“With one leg!” interrupted Frances.
“Ay, ay,” said Lauson; “but I saw him myself find the other, so there is nothing so surprising in his having the two now.”
The ladies requested an explanation, and Mr. Lauson gave the best he could, by recounting as much as he had witnessed of the scene which opens our history.
[CHAPTER VI.]
“Of snowy white the dress, the buskin white,
And purest white, the graceful waving plume.”
In about six weeks the marriage of Frances and Lord L— took place, and the happy couple set off for Beech Park, his lordship’s seat, near London. Within the following ten days Mrs. Montgomery made all her home arrangements, paid her pensioners, gave orders for the Christmas dinner of the neighbouring poor, placed Edmund in the peculiar care of Mrs. Smyth; and, finally, the day before she set out to join her daughter and son-in-law, dispatched Henry, under escort of the butler, back to S— B— school. The school, as we have before observed, was an excellent, though a cheap one; but the lodging was such as Mrs. Montgomery certainly would not have selected for her nephew, nor indeed suffered him to occupy, could she have known the scenes and society into which it threw him.
Henry arrived at the village of S— B—, and jumped out of the carriage at the door of a butcher’s house. While the servant was taking out the luggage, Henry addressed, very familiarly, a woman who stood with her back to him; and accommodating his language, as was his custom, to his company, said, “Weel, Katty, and whoo is’t wee aw wee you?” “No mickle the better for yeer axin!” she replied, continuing her washing. The next moment Henry was engaged in a game of romps with a fine girl of fourteen, who just then came in from the garden: all the flowers which had lately bloomed there collected in her apron, to be tied up in penny bunches for the ensuing day’s market. On receiving, though not, it must be confessed, without richly deserving it, a smart slap on the ear from his fair antagonist, the young gentleman closed with her, and commenced an absolute boxing-match. At this juncture the butcher himself entered.