r that day. Dorothy was
probably born in England, maybe at Chicksands. Her other sisters had
married and settled in various parts of England before 1653. Her eldest
sister (not Anne, as Wotton conjectures) married one Sir Thomas Peyton,
a Kentish Royalist of some note. What little could be gleaned of his
actions from amongst Kentish antiquities and history, and such letters
of his as lie entombed in the MSS. of the British Museum, is set down
hereafter. He appears to have acted, after her father's death, as
Dorothy's guardian, and his name occurs more than once in the pages of
her letters.

So much for the Osbornes of Chicksands; an obstinate, sturdy,
quick-witted race of Cavaliers; linked by marriage to the great families
of the land; aristocrats in blood and in spirit, of whom Dorothy was a
worthy descendant. Let us try now and picture for ourselves their home.
Chixon, Chikesonds, or Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, as it now
stands,--what a pleasing various art was spelling in olden time,--was,
in the reign of Edward III., a nunnery, situated then, as now, on a
slight eminence, with gently rising hills at a short distance behind,
and a brook running to join the river Ivel, thence the German Ocean,
along the valley in front of the house. The neighbouring scenery of
Bedfordshire is on a humble scale, and concerns very little those who do
not frequent it and live among it, as we must do for the next year or
more.

The Priory is a low-built sacro-secular edifice, well fitted for
its former service. Its priestly denizens were turned out in Henry
VIII.'s monk-hunting reign (1538). To the joy or sorrow of the
neighbourhood,--who knows now? Granted then to one Richard Snow, of whom
the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth's reign, to Sir John
Osborne, Knt., thus becoming the ancestral home of our Dorothy. There is
a crisp etching of the house in Fisher's _Collections of Bedfordshire_.
The very exterior of it is Catholic, unpuritanical; no methodism about
the square windows, set here and there at undecided intervals
wheresoever they may be wanted. Six attic windows jut out from the
low-tiled roof. At the corner of the house is a high pinnacled buttress
rising the full height of the wall; five buttresses flank the side wall,
built so that they shade the lower windows from the morning sun,--in one
place reaching to the sill of an upper window. At the further end of the
wall are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants,