be, if it were not for the next item of intelligence I shall lay before you.  Captain and Mrs. James have taken the old house next Pearson’s; and the house is overrun with mice, which is just as fortunate for me as the King of Egypt’s rat-ridden kingdom was to Dick Whittington.  For my cat’s kittening decided me to go and call on the bride, in hopes she wanted a cat; which she did like a sensible woman, as I do believe she is, in spite of Baptism, Bakers, Bread, and Birmingham, and something worse than all, which you shall hear about, if you’ll only be patient.  As I had got my best bonnet on, the one I bought when poor Lord Ludlow was last at Hanbury in ’99—­I thought it a great condescension in myself (always remembering the date of the Galindo baronetcy) to go and call on the bride; though I don’t think so much of myself in my every-day clothes, as you know.  But who should I find there but my Lady Ludlow!  She looks as frail and delicate as ever, but is, I think, in better heart ever since that old city merchant of a Hanbury took it into his head that he was a cadet of the Hanburys of Hanbury, and left her that handsome legacy.  I’ll warrant you that the mortgage was paid off pretty fast; and Mr. Horner’s money—­or my lady’s money, or Harry Gregson’s money, call it which you will—­is invested in his name, all right and tight; and they do talk of his being captain of his school, or Grecian, or something, and going to college, after all!  Harry Gregson the poacher’s son!  Well! to be sure, we are living in strange times!

’But I have not done with the marriages yet.  Captain James’s is all very well, but no one cares for it now, we are so full of Mr. Gray’s.  Yes, indeed, Mr. Gray is going to be married, and to nobody else but my little Bessy!  I tell her she will have to nurse him half the days of her life, he is such a frail little body.  But she says she does not care for that; so that his body holds his soul, it is enough for her.  She has a good spirit and a brave heart, has my Bessy!  It is a great advantage that she won’t have to mark her clothes over again:  for when she had knitted herself her last set of stockings, I told her to put G for Galindo, if she did not choose to put it for Gibson, for she should be my child if she was no one else’s.  And now you see it stands for Gray.  So there are two marriages, and what more would you have?  And she promises to take another of my kittens.

’Now, as to deaths, old Farmer Hale is dead—­poor old man, I should think his wife thought it a good riddance, for he beat her every day that he was drunk, and he was never sober, in spite of Mr. Gray.  I don’t think (as I tell him) that Mr. Gray would ever have found courage to speak to Bessy as long as Farmer Hale lived, he took the old gentleman’s sins so much to heart, and seemed to think it was all his fault for not being able to make a sinner into a saint.  The parish bull is dead too.  I never was