at Court Farm. A good landlord, an easy
rent, incessant labour, unremitting frugality, and excellent times,
insured a regular though moderate profit; and she lived on, grumbling
and prospering, flourishing and complaining, till two misfortunes befell
her at once--her father died, and her lease expired. The loss of her
father although a bedridden man, turned of ninety, who could not in the
course of nature have been expected to live long, was a terrible shock
to a daughter, who was not so much younger as to be without fears for
her own life, and who had besides been so used to nursing the good old
man, and looking to his little comforts, that she missed him as a mother
would miss an ailing child. The expiration of the lease was a grievance
and a puzzle of a different nature. Her landlord would have willingly
retained his excellent tenant, but not on the terms on which she then
held the land, which had not varied for fifty years; so that poor Mrs.
Sally had the misfortune to find rent rising and prices sinking both at
the same moment--a terrible solecism in political economy. Even this,
however, I believe she would have endured, rather than have quitted the
house where she was born, and to which all her ways and notions were
adapted, had not a priggish steward, as much addicted to improvement
and reform as she was to precedent and established usages, insisted on
binding her by lease to spread a certain number of loads of chalk on
every field. This tremendous innovation, for never had that novelty in
manure whitened the crofts and pightles of Court Farm, decided her at
once. She threw the proposals into the fire, and left the place in a
week.

Her choice of a habitation occasioned some wonder, and much amusement
in our village world. To be sure, upon the verge of seventy, an old maid
may be permitted to dispense with the more rigid punctilio of her class,
but Mrs. Sally had always been so tenacious on the score of character,
so very a prude, so determined an avoider of the 'men folk' (as she
was wont contemptuously to call them), that we all were conscious of
something like astonishment, on finding that she and her little handmaid
had taken up their abode in one end of a spacious farmhouse belonging to
the bluff old bachelor, George Robinson, of the Lea. Now Farmer Robinson
was quite as notorious for his aversion to petticoated things, as Mrs.
Sally for her hatred to the unfeathered bipeds who wear doublet and
hose, so tha