Then he took his place among the great county families of England.  He passed over his own hills, and went up to London, and did homage for the king’s grace to him.  And that strange journey awakened in the mountain lord some old spirit of adventure and curiosity.  He came home by the ocean, and perceived that he had only half lived before.  He sent his sons to Oxford; he made them travel; he was delighted when the youngest two took to the sea as naturally as the eider-ducks fledged in a sea-sand nest.

Good fortune did not spoil the old, cautious family.  It went “cannily” forward, and knew how “to take occasion by the hand,” and how to choose its friends.  Towards the close of the eighteenth century, an opportune loan again set the doors of the House of Lords open to the Sandals; but the head of the family was even less inclined to enter it than his grandfather had been.

“Nay, then,” was his answer, “t’ Sandals are too old a family to hide their heads in a coronet.  Happen, I am a bit opinion-tied, but it’s over late to loosen knots made centuries ago; and I don’t want to loosen them, neither.”

So it will be perceived, that, though the Sandals moved, they moved slowly.  A little change went a great way with them.  The men were all conservative in politics, the women intensely so in all domestic traditions.  They made their own sweet waters and unguents and pomades, long after the nearest chemist supplied a far better and cheaper article.  Their spinning-wheels hummed by the kitchen-fire, and their shuttles glided deftly in the weaving-room, many a year after Manchester cottons were cheap and plentiful.  But they were pleasant, kindly women, who did wonderful needlework, and made all kinds of dainty dishes and cordials and sirups.  They were famous florists and gardeners, and the very neatest of housewives.  They visited the poor and sick, and never went empty-handed.  They were hearty Churchwomen.  They loved God, and were truly pious, and were hardly aware of it; for those were not days of much inquiry.  People did their duty and were happy, and did not reason as to “why” they did it, nor try to ascertain if there were a legitimate cause for the effect.

But about the beginning of this century, a different day began to dawn over Sandal-Side.  The young heir came to his own, and signalized the event by marrying the rich Miss Lowther of Whitehaven.  She had been finely educated.  She had lived in large cities, and been to court.  She dressed elegantly; she had a piano and much grand furniture brought over the hills to Sandal; and she filled the old house during the summer with lords and ladies, and poets and artists, who flitted about the idyllic little village, like gay butterflies in a lovely garden.