“The Royal Academy received these apartments as a gift from their munificent founder, George the Third; and it has always been understood by the members that his Majesty, when he gave up to the government his palace of old Somerset House (where the Royal Academy was originally established), stipulated that apartments should be erected for that establishment in the new building. The Royal Academy remained in the old palace till those rooms were completed which had been destined for their occupation; plans of which had been submitted to their approval, and signed by the president, council, and officers.”
A Winter Wedding-Party in the Wilds.
“I’m sorry for the lasses’ disappointment, wife, but they can’t go. It would be madness to think of it. The phaeton would be broken to bits, if the grey mare could do the distance, in such weather, which she couldn’t; and if we were to send into Winton to ask, there’s not one of the inns would let a chaise go out of the yard after last night’s fall of snow.”
For two or three minutes there was a blank silence round the breakfast table; Anne’s eyes grew tearfully bright, Sophy looked rebellious, and I began to experience a painful difficulty in swallowing as I stared out of the window at the hopeless prospect of a great drift, which levelled the garden hedge with the fields beyond, and went sloping up in a snowy undulation to the brow of the Langhill.
“If a phaeton can’t pull through the snow, how will Cousin Mary get to church to be married?” proposed Sophy.
“She’ll ride as your father and mother did on the same occasion, Miss.”
“I wore a plum-coloured cloth habit, faced with velvet, and sugar-loaf buttons, and a hat with a gold band on it,” said Mrs. Preston. “I believe, father, it was a morning to the full as bad as this, was our wedding; and yet didn’t all the folks come over from Appley Moor? To be sure they did, every one of them!”
“And the road from Appley Moor to Rookwood Grange is worse than the road we should have to go, isn’t it, mother?” insinuated Sophy.
“Couldn’t be worse than Binks’ Wold,” replied her father; and to spare himself any further aggravation from our faces of reproach and mortification, he marched away, after his ample breakfast, out of the room, and out of the house. Mrs. Preston disappeared also, and we three young ones were left alone to bewail our disappointment.