ntly got into uniform--all of them had
arrived from nobody knew where, and hence were matter of great curiosity.
They seemed to the mere eye to belong to a different order of beings from
those who inhabited the valleys below. Apparently unconscious and
careless of what all the world was doing elsewhere, they remained
picturesquely engrossed in the business of making themselves a habitation
on the isolated spot which they had chosen.

Mrs. Garland was of a festive and sanguine turn of mind, a woman soon set
up and soon set down, and the coming of the regiments quite excited her.
She thought there was reason for putting on her best cap, thought that
perhaps there was not; that she would hurry on the dinner and go out in
the afternoon; then that she would, after all, do nothing unusual, nor
show any silly excitements whatever, since they were unbecoming in a
mother and a widow. Thus circumscribing her intentions till she was
toned down to an ordinary person of forty, Mrs. Garland accompanied her
daughter downstairs to dine, saying, 'Presently we will call on Miller
Loveday, and hear what he thinks of it all.'

II. SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN

Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of
corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity. His
ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and De La
Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions of the
house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its members
were not recorded during the Middle Ages, and thus their private lives in
any given century were uncertain. But it was known that the family had
formed matrimonial alliances with farmers not so very small, and once
with a gentleman-tanner, who had for many years purchased after their
death the horses of the most aristocratic persons in the county--fiery
steeds that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred
guineas.

It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had been
eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of
whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires
and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of
Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full
of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the
unwritten history of England. His immediate father had greatly improved
the v