Bessie's Fortune

During her many trips across the water, she had been presented to the queen, had attended, by invitation, a garden party, and a ball at which the Prince and Princess of Wales were present, and had spent several weeks in the country houses of some of the wealthy English. Consequently, she considered herself quite au fait with their style and customs, which she never failed to descant upon, greatly to the amusement of her listeners, and the mortification of Grey, who was now old enough to see how ridiculous it made his mother appear.

Grey was delighted to go to Allington, and the grandest dinner party in the world, with all the peers of England as guests, would have been a small compensation for the good cheer he expected both at Grey's Park, and at the farm-house. He was glad, too, for the snow and as the express train sped swiftly on, and he watched it from the window, falling in blinding sheets and covering all the hill-tops, he thought what fun it would be on the morrow to drive his Aunt Lucy's bays over to the farm-house after his Aunt Hannah, whom he would take for a long drive across the country, and frighten with the rapidity with which the bays would skim along.

"Hurrah! There's Allington, and there's Tom," he cried, springing up as the train shot under the bridge near the station. "Come on, mother, I have your traps, great box, little box, soap-stone, and bag. Here we are! And, my eyes what a blizzard! It's storming great guns, but here goes," and the eager boy jumped from the car into the snow, and shook hands with Tom, his Aunt Lucy's coachman, and the baggage-master, and the boy from the market where his aunt bought her meat, and Saul Sullivan, the fiddler, the most shiftless, easy-going fellow in Allington, who wore one of Grey's discarded hats given to him the previous year.

"Holloa! holloa! how are you?" he kept repeating, as one after another pressed up to him, all glad to welcome the city boy who was so popular among them. Hearing his mother's lamentations over the snow, he said to the coachman: "Here, Tom, take these traps, while I carry mother to the carriage." Then, turning to her, he continued; "Now, little mother, it will never do for those silk stockings to be spoiled, when there is a great strapping fellow like me to whom you are only a feather's weight," and lifting the lady in his arms as if she had really been a child, he carried her to the carriage, and put her in, tucking the blankets around her, and carefully brushing the snow from her bonnet. "Now, father, jump in, and let me shut the door. I'm going on the box with Tom. I like the snow, and it is not cold. I am going to drive myself." And in spite of his mother's protestations, Grey mounted to the box, and taking the reins, started the willing horses at a rapid rate toward Grey's Park, where Miss Lucy waited for them.