“Don’t disturb Mr Peeper,” he said, “but help me to launch the little punt.”

By dint of a little labour, the small vessel was got into the water, and Mr Lutter, taking a scull in his hand, paddled over to the other side, and embarked the gentleman in the blue coat.  Paddling towards an undefended part of the castle, he taught him how to clamber up the wall; and Mr Samson, wiping the stains of his climbing from the knees of his nether habiliments, looked round the castle-yard.  “Well! who’d have thought that such a monstrous strong-looking place should be stormed by a middle-aged gentleman in a punt!”

“You’ve a friend in the garrison, you’ll remember, sir, and the battlements have never been repaired.”

“They ain’t worth repairing.  It’s a regular waste of building materials to make such thick walls and pinnacles.  Blowed, if them stones wouldn’t build a mill; and a precious water-power, too,” he added, as he saw the river sparkling downward at the northern side.  “Oho!  I must have a talk with Jane.  Will you take me to Mrs Belfront?  I haven’t seen her for five years.  She must be much changed since then, and I must prepare her for the arrival of her cousins.”

Jane was sitting in the great hall, feeling disconsolate enough.  Often, in her father’s comfortable parlour, she had read accounts of baronial residences of the olden time; and one of the greatest pleasures she had felt in becoming Mrs Belfront, was to be the possessor of a real bona fide castle that had been actually a fortress in the days of knighthood.  She had studied long ago the adventures of high-born dames and stately nobles, till she was nearly as far gone in romance as Don Quixote; and many questions she had asked about Belfront, and donjon-towers, and keeps, and tiltyards, and laboured very hard to acquire a correct idea of the mode of life and manners of the days of chivalry.  Her imagination, we have seen, was too lively to be restrained by the more matter-of-fact nature of her husband; and she now felt with great bitterness the difference between presiding at a tournament, or being present at the Vow of the Peacock, and the slavish submission in which she, with the whole household, was held by Mr Pepper.  Deeply she now regretted the feelings of superiority she had experienced over her own relations by her marriage into such an ancient race as the Belfronts.  She felt ashamed of the contempt she had felt for the industrious founders of her own family’s wealth, and at that moment would have preferred the blue coat and brass buttons of her uncle Samson, to all the escutcheons and shields of the Norman conquest; and at that moment, luckily, the identical coat and buttons made their appearance.

“Well, niece, here’s a go!” exclaimed the angry uncle.  “Is this a way to receive a near relation after such a journey?”

“Oh, uncle!”

“Why, did ye never hear tell of such a place as Kidderminster?—­have you no carpets?”