Lady Elizabeth took off her eye-glasses, and held out her hands for mine.

“Is it grumbling, little woman?” she said.  “Well, I’m not sure.”

“I’m not sure,” I said, smiling; “for you know I only said I should be so glad to be alone with Joseph, and to try to be good to him; for he is a very kind boy, and if he is a little awkward with the dolls, I mean to make the best of it. One can’t have everything,” I added, laughing.

Lady Elizabeth drew my head towards her, and stroked and kissed it.

“GOD bless you, child,” she said.  “You have inherited your father’s smile.”

* * * * *

“But, I say, Selina,” whispered Joseph, when I went to look at his fortress in the bay-window.  “Do you suppose it’s because he’s dead that she cried behind her spectacles when she said you had got his smile?”

A HAPPY FAMILY.

CHAPTER I.

    “If solid happiness we prize,
    Within our breast this jewel lies.

* * * * *

    From our own selves our joys must flow,
      And peace begins at home.”

    COTTON.

The family—­our family, not the Happy Family—­consisted of me and my brothers and sisters.  I have a father and mother, of course.

I am the eldest, as I remind my brothers; and of the more worthy gender, which my sisters sometimes forget.  Though we live in the village, my father is a gentleman, as I shall be when I am grown up.  I have told the village boys so more than once.  One feels mean in boasting that one is better born than they are; but if I did not tell them, I am not sure that they would always know.

Our house is old, and we have a ghost—­the ghost of my great-great-great-great-great-aunt.

She “crossed her father’s will,” nurse says, and he threatened to flog her with his dog-whip, and she ran away, and was never heard of more.  He would not let the pond be dragged, but he never went near it again; and the villagers do not like to go near it now.  They say you may meet her there, after sunset, flying along the path among the trees, with her hair half down, and a knot of ribbon fluttering from it, and parted lips, and terror in her eyes.

The men of our family (my father’s family, my mother is Irish) have always had strong wills.  I have a strong will myself.

People say I am like the picture of my great-grandfather (the great-great-great-nephew of the ghost).  He must have been a wonderful old gentleman by all accounts.  Sometimes nurse says to us, “Have your own way, and you’ll live the longer,” and it always makes me think of great-grandfather, who had so much of his own way, and lived to be nearly a hundred.

I remember my father telling us how his sisters had to visit their old granny for months at a time, and how he shut the shutters at three o’clock on summer afternoons, and made them play dummy whist by candle light.