r ever and anon she interrupted herself to scold the
children, to inquire "what o'clock it was;" to observe that "Sarah
would never suit;" and to wonder "why Mr. Leslie would not see that the
work-table was mended." Mrs. Leslie has been rather a pretty woman. In
spite of a dress at once slatternly and economical, she has still the
air of a lady,--rather too much so, the hard duties of her situation
considered. She is proud of the antiquity of her family on both sides;
her mother was of the venerable stock of the Daudlers of Daudle Place, a
race that existed before the Conquest. Indeed, one has only to read
our earliest chronicles, and to glance over some of those long-winded
moralizing poems which delighted the thanes and ealdermen of old, in
order to see that the Daudles must have been a very influential family
before William the First turned the country topsy-turvy. While the
mother's race was thus indubitably Saxon, the father's had not only
the name but the peculiar idiosyncrasy of the Normans, and went far to
establish that crotchet of the brilliant author of "Sybil; or, The Two
Nations," as to the continued distinction between the conquering
and conquered populations. Mrs. Leslie's father boasted the name of
Montfichet,--doubtless of the same kith and kin as those great barons of
Alontfichet, who once owned such broad lands and such turbulent castles.
A high-nosed, thin, nervous, excitable progeny, those same Montfydgets,
as the most troublesome Norman could pretend to be. This fusion of race
was notable to the most ordinary physiognomist in the physique and
in the morale of Mrs. Leslie. She had the speculative blue eye of the
Saxon, and the passionate high nose of the Norman; she had the musing
do-nothingness of the Daudlers, and the reckless have-at-every-thingness
of the Montfydgets. At Mrs. Leslie's feet, a little girl with her hair
about her ears (and beautiful hair it was too) was amusing herself with
a broken-nosed doll. At the far end of the room, before a high desk,
sat Frank's Eton schoolfellow, the eldest son. A minute or two before
Frank's alarum had disturbed the tranquillity of the household, he had
raised his eyes from the books on the desk to glance at a very tattered
copy of the Greek Testament, in which his brother Oliver had found a
difficulty that he came to Randal to solve. As the young Etonian's face
was turned to the light, your first impression on seeing it would have
been melancholy, but res