Indeed, even at that early day the girl’s beauty was enough to make her talked about.  And that foolish little fop, her father, had more than once declared before a company in our dining room that it was high time another title came into his family, and that he meant to take Dolly abroad when she was sixteen.  Lad that I was, I would mark with pain the blush on Mrs. Manners’s cheek, and clinch my fists as she tried to pass this off as a joke of her husband’s.  But Dolly, who sat next me at a side table, would make a wry little face at my angry one.

“You shall call me ‘my lady,’ Richard.  And sometimes, if you are good, you shall ride inside my coroneted coach when you come home.”

Ah, that was the worst of it!  The vixen was conscious of her beauty.  But her airs were so natural that young and old bowed before her.  Nothing but worship had she had from the cradle.  I would that Mr. Peale had painted her in her girlhood as a type of our Maryland lady of quality.  Harvey was right when he called her a thoroughbred.  Her nose was of patrician straightness, and the curves of her mouth came from generations of proud ancestors.  And she had blue eyes to conquer and subdue; with long lashes to hide them under when she chose, and black hair with blue gloss upon it in the slanting lights.  I believe I loved her best in the riding-habit that was the colour of the red holly in our Maryland woods.  At Christmas-tide, when we came to the eastern shore, we would gallop together through miles of country, the farmers and servants tipping and staring after her as she laid her silver-handled whip upon her pony.  She knew not the meaning of fear, and would take a fence or a ditch that a man might pause at.  And so I fell into the habit of leading her the easy way round, for dread that she would be hurt.

How those Christmas times of childhood come sweeping back on my memory!  Often, and without warning, my grandfather would say to me:  “Richard, we shall celebrate at the Hall this year.”  And it rarely turned out that arrangements had not been made with the Lloyds and the Bordleys and the Manners, and other neighbours, to go to the country for the holidays.  I have no occasion in these pages to mention my intimacy with the sons and daughters of those good friends of the Carvels’, Colonel Lloyd and Mr. Bordley.  Some of them are dead now, and the rest can thank God and look back upon worthy and useful lives.  And if any of these, my old playmates, could read this manuscript, perchance they might feel a tingle of recollection of Children’s Day, when Maryland was a province.  We rarely had snow; sometimes a crust upon the ground that was melted into paste by the noonday sun, but more frequently, so it seems to me, a foggy, drizzly Christmas, with the fires crackling in saloon and lady’s chamber.  And when my grandfather and the ladies and gentlemen, his guests, came down the curving stairs, there were the broadly smiling servants drawn up in the wide