hearts of the inhabitants.

The Earles had

long had the reputation of being a self-willed, proud, gloomy-tempered race, apt to quarrel with their neighbours, and not particularly inclined to live happily among themselves. For several generations there had been alternately a spendthrift and a miser at the head of the house; the one following in regular succession to undo the work of the other, and so keep up the family prosperity at a certain average height. Once, and only once, there had been a crisis of danger, when the old house really ran some risk of falling into new hands; it was in the last few years of the life of Major Earle's grandfather, who had shown a greater talent for spending money and mismanaging his affairs than had yet been developed in the family. If he had lived ten years longer than he did, the site of Earle's Court would now have been bearing a row of whitewashed villas, or a bone or colour-mill. The guardian spirit of the place interfered to

avert such calamity; the old spendthrift died, and his son, coming into his property early in life, showed a decision and enterprise as much above the character which it was his turn to enact, as his father had exceeded in extravagance the preceding examples of his. Not satisfied with his traditionary lot of saving, he had the spirit to think of earning. He sold off as much of the land as was necessary to pay his father's debts, shut up the old house, and went away to make his fortune in India. It was at the time when fortunes were made in India, and when people did not care much to ask how. He came back before he was a middle-aged man, with enough, as he thought, to buy back all the old lands twice over. The house was opened in greater splendour than ever, but the old consequence of the family, and a large share of the old lands, had passed into newer and more vigorous hands. Mr. Earle found rivals near his throne, and neither his money nor his strong

hereditary will, could enable him to drive them away. The quiet, dingy old port of Kingsmills had risen suddenly into consequence; manufactories had been established round; large docks were being constructed in the estuary of its slow river; fields that had been sold for a few pounds could not now be repurchased for thousands. Mr. Earle struggled, quarrelled, and intrigued for a few years to secure a larger margin in which to entrench his family pride, and then gave up the contest with sullen dissatisfaction in his heart, and shut himself up within the still uninvaded domain, to rule his family all the more arbitrarily, because the range of his power was more limited than he had expected it to be. His was one of those restless, exacting wills that will not be satisfied with anything less than the utter annihilation of character in all around them; no minute circumstance of daily life was so small that he did not wish to regulate it; no recess of the heart of

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G

wife, or child, so sacred, that he would not willingly have meddled there and ruled. As his children grew up, however, there was one so like him in mind and character, with thoughts and purposes so exactly set to be the echo of his own, that a sort of partnership in power became possible between them. This one favoured person was his eldest daughter, Harriet Earle. She grew up beautiful, wilful, and proud; but with a deeper heart and a finer tact, she stood as interpreter between the rest of the world and her father, and gave something of happiness and domestic love to the latter years of his life. His sons had naturally been rebellious under such a rule as his. The eldest showed early that the order of succession in the Earle family was not likely to be contradicted in his case. His extravagance and folly provoked his father to banish him from home before he was quite a man; he entered the army, had the good fortune to marry an heiress, and held very little

intercourse with his family afterwards. The second son, Arthur, with a degree less strength. of character, had more tact, or some greater power of inspiring affection. His father showed a much larger charity for his failings, and his sister took him under her special protection, and was always on the watch to further his interest and screen him from his father's displeasure. It is true, they were always quarrelling; the brother was always chaffing against his sister's power, always scorning her advice and thwarting her wishes, and then, when he could no longer do without her, coming back, and putting his head under the yoke he professed so to hate; and yet he was the one object of interest in her life; she loved him better than she did her father, better by far than she loved her meek younger sister, who lived in peace near her, because she had never had a wish of her own in her life. Peace, in herself or with others, was not the element in which Harriet Earle flourished;