Sink or Swim? , Volume I

"Well, mother, ain't this better now than to be sitting mending stockings, and to be bothering about pickles and preserves at home? " asked genial John Beacham of his highly respectable parent as mother and son, sitting in the front-seat of the most well-appointed of "traps," were jogging quietly along the pleasant lanes towards Danescourt.

It was somewhat against the grain, and not a little to his own inconvenience, that John Beacham was devoting a day to amuse his womankind on that eventful twenty-fourth of July. Danescourt was a good five-and-twenty miles from the Paddocks. In little more than half-an-hour the travellers could be conveyed by rail from Switcham to Gawthorpe; the latter place being the nearest town and station -- distant about three miles -- from Danescourt. But Mrs. Beacham unfortunately entertained, amongst other immutable prejudices, a very decided one against steam locomotion. As a rule she was not greatly troubled with "nerves; " but the exception was when, by some extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, she found herself whirled along in an express-train, gasping for breath, and ejaculating piteous appeals for protection to that Power which, under the ordinary circumstances of everyday life, we are all of us so given both to ignore and to forget.