bow and her eight tall daughters?
No; I daresay not. The world's old and losing its memory when it begins
to talk of Woman Suffrage.

This Kitty, or Christian, or Christiana Lebow was by birth a Bottrell: and
a finer family than the Bottrells, by their own account, you wouldn't find
in all England. Not that it matters whether they came over with William
the Norman, nor whether they could once on a time ride from sea to sea on
their own acres. For Kitty was the last to carry the name, and she left
it in Ardevora vestry the day she signed marriage with Paul Lebow (or, as
he wrote it, Lebeau--"b-e-a-u,"): and the property had gone generations
before. As she said 'pon her death-bed, "five-foot-six of church-hay will
hold the only two achers left to me," she being a little body and very
facetious to the last, and meaning her legs, of course.

Now the reason I can't tell you: but the mischief with the Bottrells was
this: That for generation after generation all the spirit of the family
went to the females. The men just dandered away their time and their
money, fell into declines, or had fits and went out like the snuff of a
candle. But the women couldn't be held nor bound, lived to any age they
pleased, and either kept their sweethearts on the hook or married them
and made their lives a burden. Oh, a bean-fed sex, sir, and monstrous
handsome! And Kitty, though little, was as handsome as any, and walked
Ardevora streets with her eight daughters, all tall as grenadiers and
terrible as an army with banners.

Her father, old Piers Bottrell, had been a ship's captain: a very tidy old
fellow in his behaviour, but muddled in mind, especially towards the end;
so that when he died (which he did in his bed, quite peaceful) he must
needs take and haunt the house. There wasn't a ha'porth of reason for it,
that anyone could discover; and Kitty didn't mind it one farthing.
But some say it frightened her husband into his grave: though I reckon he
took worse fright at Kitty presenting him with eight daughters one after
the other. With a woman like that, you can't say where accident ends and
love of mischief begins. And for that matter, there was no telling why
she'd married the man at all except for mischief: his father and mother
being poor French refugees that had come to Ardevora, thirty years before,
and been given shelter by the borough charity in the old Ugnes House[1]--
the same that old Piers Bottrell afterwards bought