The festivities of the winter brought these families much together. Woodburn Grange presented all the genial and gay abundance of fare—fat turkeys and geese, mince-pies, pork-pies, possets, and a world of light delicacies, blazing fires, and country sports and dances, even blind-man’s-buff, turn-trencher, and other romps, which had been preserved at the Grange from father to son as essential customs of country-life. These had a novelty, and, therefore, a greater charm for the young people from the town, than the more ordinary dinner-parties and dances of the great halls. Even Sir Emanuel Clavering became a laughing boy again at the rural revels of the Grange, and vied with the lightsome, butterfly gaiety of Letty, amid these domestic saturnalia. Sir Emanuel even opened his house to several gay parties, and embellished his handsome suite of rooms with a display of arms of richest and quaintest workmanship, caskets of ivory of most delicate carvings, and others inlaid with jewels and gold, with silken draperies of richest colours and strange devices, and china jars and vessels, some of stupendous size, and most superb forms, and painted enamelings. He himself moved everywhere amongst his guests, as affable, kind, gracefully courteous and cordial, as if he, too, never studied anything but to enjoy his fortune and position as a finished gentleman. Except his brother and his brother’s wife, he was now alone in his house, for his son was and had been some time abroad. All were charmed with Sir Emanuel, and wondered that he had spent so secluded a life in the country. Perhaps the cause was not far to seek, when it was recollected that Sir Roger Rockville, the Bullocksheds, and Tenterhooks had been his chief neighbours. As the winter passed, and the spring days grew in warmth and pleasantness, the intercourse of these families grew too. Mr. and Mrs. Degge would call and join the young people of the Grange in their walks or rides, and Mrs. Degge would drop in and have a pleasant chat with Mrs. Woodburn, Ann, and Letty, as they went on with their different concerns. The great concern of Letty, indeed, seeming to be to laugh and chatter, as if there were no such things as care or matter-of-fact duty in the world. She had to show Mrs. Degge the herds of young ducks and chickens, the birds’ nests in curious places in the garden, the dogs, and the rabbits kept in the hutches, as if she had been an actual boy, and to the evident delight of their visitor, while a flood of intervening small-talk produced bursts of merry laughter, which, reaching the house, made the graver mother exclaim, “What _can_ that girl be about?”