up the woodbine, and eat syllabub in a bower; to present "great frieze
coats" and "riding-hoods" to a dozen of the poorest old men and women in
the parish; to hear prayers in a little grey church, through whose open
windows ivy nodded, and before whose doors trees arched in vistas; to
see her sweet little Prissy and Fiddy, who had taken such a fancy to
her, and the vicar, and madam, and granny, and find them all perfectly
agreeable, and not slighting her or doubting her because she had been a
woman of fashion and an actress; and Master Rowland well disposed of
elsewhere; Larks' Hall deserted by its master--the brave, generous,
enamoured squire--heigho! Mistress Betty, for all her candour, good
humour, and cordiality, had her decent pride, and would not have thrown
herself at any man's head.

Somersetshire, in spite of Bath, was as antediluvian a hundred and fifty
years ago as the lanes and coombes of Devonshire. Larks' Hall, Foxholes,
Bearwood, the Vicarage of Mosely, and their outlying acquaintances,
their yeomen and their labourers, lived as old-fashioned and hearty a
life as if the battle of Sedgemoor had never been fought.

Down in Somersetshire, among its orchards, nutteries, and blackberry
thickets, poor little Mistress Fiddy was drooping, as girls would pine
sometimes, even in the days of Will Shakspeare, ere cloth-yard shafts
were abolished from merry England, when there were still mayings among
the hyacinths, and milkmaids' dances under the thorns, and mummings when
the snow fell. And Dick Ashbridge shot and fished in the most
disconsolate abandonment, though the girl yet ran past him "like a
ghost" when the beetle and bat were abroad, and he was still mooning
about the vicarage meadows.

Neither of them knew for certain, and nobody could predict exactly, that
she would live to wed Dick, bear him children, and leave him a sorrowful
widower, whose heart was chastened--not torn. No; nor could the good
folk in Somersetshire understand how closely Lady Betty and little Fiddy
were bound up together, and how little Fiddy was to return Lady Betty's
kindness, in the days when the little girl should be the teacher, and
the fine woman the scholar, and the lesson to be learnt came from
regions beyond the stars.

In the meantime, Fiddy was a sick, capricious, caressed darling in a
cambric cap and silk shawl, on whom fond friends were waiting lovingly:
whom nobody in the world, not even the doctor, the parish clerk, or