re I tell you about Mr. Gray, I think I ought to make you understand
something more of what we did all day long at Hanbury Court. There were
five of us at the time of which I am speaking, all young women of good
descent, and allied (however distantly) to people of rank. When we were
not with my lady, Mrs. Medlicott looked after us; a gentle little woman,
who had been companion to my lady for many years, and was indeed, I have
been told, some kind of relation to her. Mrs. Medlicott's parents had
lived in Germany, and the consequence was, she spoke English with a very
foreign accent. Another consequence was, that she excelled in all manner
of needlework, such as is not known even by name in these days. She
could darn either lace, table-linen, India muslin, or stockings, so that
no one could tell where the hole or rent had been. Though a good
Protestant, and never missing Guy Faux day at church, she was as skilful
at fine work as any nun in a Papist convent. She would take a piece of
French cambric, and by drawing out some threads, and working in others,
it became delicate lace in a very few hours. She did the same by
Hollands cloth, and made coarse strong lace, with which all my lady's
napkins and table-linen were trimmed. We worked under her during a great
part of the day, either in the still-room, or at our sewing in a chamber
that opened out of the great hall. My lady despised every kind of work
that would now be called Fancy-work. She considered that the use of
coloured threads or worsted was only fit to amuse children; but that
grown women ought not to be taken with mere blues and reds, but to
restrict their pleasure in sewing to making small and delicate stitches.
She would speak of the old tapestry in the hall as the work of her
ancestresses, who lived before the Reformation, and were consequently
unacquainted with pure and simple tastes in work, as well as in religion.
Nor would my lady sanction the fashion of the day, which, at the
beginning of this century, made all the fine ladies take to making shoes.
She said that such work was a consequence of the French Revolution, which
had done much to annihilate all distinctions of rank and class, and hence
it was, that she saw young ladies of birth and breeding handling lasts,
and awls, and dirty cobblers'-wax, like shoe'-makers' daughters.

Very frequently one of us would be summoned to my lady to read aloud to
her, as she sat in her small withdrawing-room, so