There, through the open door, Edwin's pigeons, Muriel's two doves, and sometimes a stately hen, walked in and out at pleasure.

Whether our live stock, brought up in the law of kindness, were as well-trained and well-behaved as our children, I cannot tell; but certain it is that we never found any harm from this system, necessitated by our early straits at Longfield--this "liberty, fraternity, and equality." Those words, in themselves true and lovely, but wrested to false meaning, whose fatal sound was now dying out of Europe, merged in the equally false and fatal shout of "Gloire! gloire!" remind me of an event which I believe was the first that broke the delicious monotony of our new life.
It was one September morning.

Mrs.Halifax, the children, and I were down at the stream, planning a bridge across it, and a sort of stable, where John's horse might be put up--the mother had steadily resisted the long-tailed grey ponies.

For with all the necessary improvements at Longfield, with the large settlement that John insisted upon making on his wife and children, before he would use in his business any portion of her fortune, we found we were by no means so rich as to make any great change in our way of life advisable.

And, after all, the mother's best luxuries were to see her children merry and strong, her husband's face lightened of its care, and to know he was now placed beyond doubt in the position he had always longed for; for was he not this very day gone to sign the lease of Enderley Mills?
Mrs.Halifax had just looked at her watch, and she and I were wondering, with quite a childish pleasure, whether he were not now signing the important deed, when Guy came running to say a coach-and-four was trying to enter the White Gate.
"Who can it be ?--But they must be stopped, or they'll spoil John's new gravel road that he takes such pride in.