Page:Austen Lady Susan Watson Letters.djvu/270

LETTERS OF JANE AUSTEN house for more than 150 years, but not being Irish tenants, I suppose they got no compensation for “disturbance.”

“John Bond” was Mr. Austen’s “factotum” in his farming operations. There is an anecdote extant relating to this worthy which may as well be told here: Mr. Austen used to join Mr. Digweed in buying twenty or thirty sheep, and that all might be fair, it was their custom to open the pen, and the first half of the sheep which ran out were counted as belonging to the rector. Going down to the fold on one occasion after this process had been gone through, Mr. Austen remarked one sheep among his lot larger and finer than the rest. “Well, John,” he observed to Bond, who was with him, “I think we have had the best of the luck with Mr. Digweed to-day, in getting that sheep.” “Maybe not so much in the luck as you think, sir,” responded the faithful John. “I see’d her the moment I come in, and set eyes on the sheep, so when we opened the pen I just giv’d her a ‘buck’ with my stick, and out a run.”

There is an allusion in the sixteenth letter to “First Impressions”—her original name for the work afterwards published as “Pride and Prejudice”—which shows that, as regards this book at least, her having written it was not secret from her family. It is singular that it should have &emsp;&emsp;[234]