ow to dust a table or make an apple pie. She has only
cook-maid and chambermaid,--Maria and Bessy, their names are,--and Sam
the serving-man. There is the old shepherd, Will, but he only comes
into the house by nows and thens. Grandmamma had a black man who waited
on us. She said it gave the place an air, and that there were
gentlewomen in Carlisle who would scarce have come to see her if she had
not had a black man to look genteel. I don't fancy I should care much
for people who would not come to see me unless I had a black servant. I
should think they came to visit him, not me. But Grandmamma said that
my old Lady Mary Garsington, in the Close, never came to see anybody who
had less than a thousand a year, and did not keep a black. She was the
grandest person Grandmamma knew at Carlisle, for most of her friends
live in the South.

I do not know exactly where the South is, nor what it is like. Of
course London is in the South; I know that. But Grandmamma used to talk
about the South as if she thought it so fine; and my Uncle Charles once
said nobody could be a gentleman who had not lived in the South. They
were all clodhoppers up here, he said, and you could only get any proper
polish in the South. Fanny was there then, and she was quite hurt with
it. She did not like to think Father a clodhopper; and I am sure he is
not. Besides, our ancestors did come from the South. Our grandfather,
William Courtenay, who bought the land and built Brocklebank, belonged
[Note 1.] Wiltshire, and his father was a Devonshire man, and a
Courtenay of Powderham, whatever that may mean: Father knows more about
it than I do, and so, I think, does Fanny. Grandmamma once told me she
would never have thought of allowing Mamma to marry Father, if he had
not been a Courtenay and a man of substance. She said all his other
relations were so very mean and low, she could not have condescended so
far as to connect herself with them. Why, I believe one of them was
only a farmer's daughter: and I think, from what I have heard Grandmamma
and my Uncle Charles say, that another of them had something to do with
those low people called Dissenters. I don't suppose she really was
one--that would be too shocking; but Grandmamma always went into the
clouds when she mentioned these vulgar ancestors of mine, so I never
heard more than "that poor wretched mother of your grandfather's, my
dear," or "that dreadful farming creature whom your grandfa