The Lady of the Manor

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: joy, and peace, will obtain, in the place of those i lent passions that injure and disgrace us. The lady then took up the manuscript, and read as follows. The Dominion of Envy. It was preciesly at the period in which I entered my eighteenth year, that I was indulged with the pleasure of accompanying my parents in a long projected visit to a friend residing in Westmoreland. We left our home in the month of June, and as we proceeded northward, we were regaled in every valley and on every plain with the breath of new-mown grass, and with the songs of village maidens, who appeared to rejoice in their escape from the distaff, and in the permission to dwell awhile amidst the green fields, and to taste the delights of rural life. It is not, however, my present purpose to trouble my readers with an account of the various adventures which we encountered in our transit over at least two-thirds of the green and fragrant disk of our little island; nor to tell how my mother and I were terrified by a baker's boy, whom we mistook for a highwayman, not having at first observed his panniers through the gloom of twilight: but, passing these things over as unimportant, I shall 4take the liberty of conveying my friends, without further preface, to the end of our journey. The persons for whom all these labours and terrors of the journey had been encountered by my mother, were an ancient couple without children, and the last of a highly respectable family, the ancestors of whom were traced as far back as the reignvftf Elizabeth. The mansion in which theyfesided, was nearly coeval with the first of the family, who'had risen from the obscure mass of the ignoble vulgar? and, from the period of the first erectionjyid undergonfefew external changes. This building was a perfect specime...