Scenes and Characters, or, Eighteen Months at Beechcroft

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Yonge Charlotte Mary. Scenes and Characters, or, Eighteen Months at Beechcroft

PREFACE

PREFACE (1886)

CHAPTER I. THE ELDER SISTER

CHAPTER II. THE NEW COURT

CHAPTER III. THE NEW PRINCIPLE

CHAPTER IV. HONEST PHYL

CHAPTER V. VILLAGE GOSSIP

CHAPTER VI. THE NEW FRIEND

CHAPTER VII. SIR MAURICE

CHAPTER VIII. THE BROTHERS

CHAPTER IX. THE WASP

CHAPTER X. COUSIN ROTHERWOOD

CHAPTER XI. DANCING

CHAPTER XII. THE FEVER

CHAPTER XIII. A CURIOSITY MAP

CHAPTER XIV. CHRISTMAS

CHAPTER XV. MINOR MISFORTUNES

CHAPTER XVI. VANITY AND VEXATION

CHAPTER XVII. LITTLE AGNES

CHAPTER XVIII. DOUBLE, DOUBLE TOIL AND TROUBLE

CHAPTER XIX. THE RECTOR’S ILLNESS

CHAPTER XX. THE LITTLE NEPHEW

CHAPTER XXI. CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME

CHAPTER XXII. THE BARONIAL COURT

CHAPTER XXIII. JOYS AND SORROWS

CHAPTER XXIV. LOVE’S LABOUR LOST

CHAPTER XXV. THE THIRTIETH OF JULY

CHAPTER XXVI. THE CRISIS

CHAPTER XXVII. CONCLUSION

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Perhaps this book is an instance to be adduced in support of the advice I have often given to young authors—not to print before they themselves are old enough to do justice to their freshest ideas.

Not that I can lay claim to its being a production of tender and interesting youth.  It was my second actual publication, and I believe I was of age before it appeared—but I see now the failures that more experience might have enabled me to avoid; and I would not again have given it to the world if the same characters recurring in another story had not excited a certain desire to see their first start.

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On the other side of the house was a terrace sloping down to a lawn and bowling-green, hedged in by a formal row of evergreens.  A noble plane-tree was in the middle of the lawn, and beyond it a pond renowned for water-lilies.  To the left was the kitchen garden, terminating in an orchard, planted on the ramparts and moat of the Old Court; then came the farm buildings, and beyond them a field, sloping upwards to an extensive wood called Beechcroft Park.  In the wood was the cottage of Walter Greenwood, gamekeeper and woodman by hereditary succession, but able and willing to turn his hand to anything, and, in fact, as Adeline once elegantly termed him, the ‘family tee totum.’

To the right of the house there was a field, called Long Acre, bounded on the other side by the turnpike road to Raynham, which led up the hill to the village green, surrounded by well-kept cottages and gardens.  The principal part of the village was, however, at the foot of the hill, where the Court lane crossed the road, led to the old church, the school, and parsonage, in its little garden, shut in by thick yew hedges.  Beyond was the blacksmith’s shop, more cottages, and Mrs. Appleton’s wondrous village warehouse; and the lane, after passing by the handsome old farmhouse of Mr. Harrington, Mr. Mohun’s principal tenant, led to a bridge across a clear trout stream, the boundary of the parish of Beechcroft.

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