the race of Silchester would be a son or a

daughter.

It was a daughter. The sequent disappointment is expressible only by asterisks.

However, within a year a son arrived, and John Silchester was happy. He had christened his little daughter Silvia. He christened his son, rather an obstreperous brat, since he gave the parson a black eye as he held him over the font, Silvester. He was an odd being, as I shall proceed to show.

But first a word concerning the lady of the manor, by no means an inconsiderable personage. As Miss Audley, heiress of Audley, she had been the belle of the county. John Silchester, a resolute young gentleman, had seen her in a box at the theatre in "Ex'ter town," and had at once made up his mind. He was not at all devoid of promptitude. He found her the very next day in Audley Park

taking her morning walk, introduced himself,

and asked her to marry him.

She consented!

Why?

Why should a Devonshire girl like this take a man at his word?

The answer is easy. She saw he was a MAN. She saw he was loving and brave and guileless and good. She saw in him what he saw in her. They married-and never had a moment's regret. They understood each other from the very first. It was a marriage of completion. The lady had just the qualities which the Squire had not. She kept house notably. Those were times when down in the country service was an inheritance; the young housemaid was mayhap the housekeeper's niece, the young stable-boy the coachman's nephew; and those elder servants felt themselves responsible for their relations, and kept them in order by sharp discipline. Now the Audleys of Audley were old-fashioned and old-fangled

folk. Their domestic affairs were well managed. They made their own butter and cheese and cream and cider, brewed their own ale, and kept it till it was strong and clear; distilled their own essences of rose, rosemary, lavender. Wherefore Joan Audley came to Silchester with full knowledge of all that a gentlewoman ought to know, and with certainty that she would teach her servants things to them unknown.

By no means let it be supposed that she was merely a good housewife. True, she knew not a word of French, and was incapable of playing the "Battle of Prague" on the piano. But in the school kept by Madam Tucker in the Cathedral Close,-an ancient lady who (with aid of younger folk) had brought up three Devon generations, and who was in the habit of keeping recalcitrant girls in order by a tap with her old ivory fan upon their shoulder,Joan Audley had learnt English well. She did not write themes; she did read Shakespeare

and Swift. She worked a sampler; she learnt her catechism; she was taught logic and geometry. Madam Tucker was of that oldfashioned style of schoolmistress which curiously united simplicity with subtlety. She would make a girl of sixteen wear a pinafore, and stand her in a corner if she gave herself airs and graces, yet would carry her into Shakspeare's magic realm, and show her the clue to Milton's music, and teach her how to detect the error of a syllogism, and make her find out for herself the curious law which holds as to the intersecting diagonals of a regular pentagon. She made her pupils do two things -obey and think. "Learn those two words thoroughly," she would say,

say, "and

good women.
think for yourselves. You will be

You must obey me.

you

will be

You must

wives and

mothers by-and-by; then you will have to obey your husbands, and at the same time to make your children and servants obey you. You will be placed in various conditions which

neither you nor I can foresee; then you will find the value of being able to think for yourselves."

Thus the old lady was wont to lecture over the breakfast table now and then.

I suppose half the wives of the Devonshire squires for about three generations learnt to obey and think from Madam Tucker in her famous school in the Close of Walter Branscombe's Cathedral. They all turned out well, those girls of hers. She would have none but ladies. She treated them with the utmost kindness, yet punished them when requisite with the utmost severity. She held herself, and with justice, the equal of the most patrician of her pupils' mothers.

Such was Mrs. Silchester's schoolmistress.

This sort of teaching has gone very much out of fashion, and I can only hope that the modern school boards may introduce something more satisfactory and scientific. there are a good many people who have felt

Still

VOL. I.

2