ly by the baby; and even Priscilla, after a week or two,
began to feel that she liked their company. Priscilla was a young
woman who read a great deal, and even had some gifts of understanding
what she read. She borrowed books from the clergyman, and paid a
penny a week to the landlady of the Stag and Antlers for the hire
during half a day of the weekly newspaper. But now there came a box
of books from Exeter, and a daily paper from London, and,--to improve
all this,--both the new comers were able to talk with her about the
things she read. She soon declared to her mother that she liked
Miss Rowley much the best of the two. Mrs. Trevelyan was too fond
of having her own way. She began to understand, she would say to
her mother, that a man might find it difficult to live with Mrs.
Trevelyan. "She hardly ever yields about anything," said Priscilla.
As Miss Priscilla Stanbury was also very fond of having her own way,
it was not surprising that she should object to that quality in this
lady, who had come to live under the same roof with her.

The country about Nuncombe Putney is perhaps as pretty as any in
England. It is beyond the river Teign, between that and Dartmoor,
and is so lovely in all its variations of rivers, rivulets, broken
ground, hills and dales, old broken, battered, time-worn timber,
green knolls, rich pastures, and heathy common, that the wonder is
that English lovers of scenery know so little of it. At the Stag and
Antlers old Mrs. Crocket, than whom no old woman in the public line
was ever more generous, more peppery, or more kind, kept two clean
bed-rooms, and could cook a leg of Dartmoor mutton and make an apple
pie against any woman in Devonshire. "Drat your fish!" she would say,
when some self-indulgent and exacting traveller would wish for more
than these accustomed viands. "Cock you up with dainties! If you
can't eat your victuals without fish, you must go to Exeter. And
then you'll get it stinking mayhap." Now Priscilla Stanbury and Mrs.
Crocket were great friends, and there had been times of deep want,
in which Mrs. Crocket's friendship had been very serviceable to the
ladies at the cottage. The three young women had been to the inn one
morning to ask after a conveyance from Nuncombe Putney to Princetown,
and had found that a four-wheeled open carriage with an old horse
and a very young driver could be hired there. "We have never dreamed
of such a thing," Priscilla Stanbury had said, "and the only