IN FOUR REIGNS. BOOK I. "Now good angels Fly o'er thy royal head, and shade thy person CHAPTER I. WHEN GEORGE THE THIRD WAS KING. THE HERE was very little to break the monotony of our lives, in the old house at Abbotsholme. We-that is, my twin sisters Judith and Primrose, and myself-passed from our babyhood to childhood, and from our childhood to girlhood, without anything particularly to mark the flight of time. We had childish diseases in regular course, from which we recovered at the appointed time under the care of Pring, our nurse, and Mr. Vidal, the Abbotsholme apothecary. We had no brothers—a great loss, for which nothing ever quite compensated. We were at this time, when I begin my story, just emerging from the bondage of Pring, and wondering if life was always to go on precisely as it now went on-never change, never alter. Pring was a thoroughly good and trusty woman, but she was stiff in her opinions. She held that the whole duty of young gentlewomen was to take care of their clothes, hold themselves upright, attend to their manners with those above them, and refrain from familiar intercourse with those of the lower class. According to Pring's doctrine, the Miss Allinghams were never to speak to those beneath them, except to give an order, or to answer a humble inquiry as to how they did. Pring, I need not say, made herself an exception to this rule, and both she and her particular friend Mrs. Bonnor, the housekeeper, though "they knew their places," did not scruple to exercise due authority over us, though it was, I must confess, always accompanied with a reminder "that young ladies like the Miss Allinghams should not do this, or should do that, because they were the Miss Allinghams, and they had an aunt a lady of title, and their papa had been next door to a nobleman, and would have been a nobleman himself if he had not been cut off in his prime, and left a widowed lady and fatherless little girls behind him." These notions of Pring's were insensibly our law, and, hearing no other doctrine preached, it is but natural that we should all have had a very exalted idea of our own position, and that we showed no inclination to forget it. The death of our father-who was, as Pring expressed it, next door to a nobleman (that is, the Honourable Primrose Allingham)-was a terrible calamity. He was thrown from his horse nearly at the door of his own house, and carried in to die. Our poor mother |