Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/160

156 of bettering it. I was well that she had been some months at Branxholm before the younger girls came home, for by that means she had learned more of Allan and of Jessie, and had contracted for them something more like friendship than she could have expected, considering the difference of their years.

Allan was her chief friend, and the person over whom she had most influence; he had always been a gentleman in mind, and he was disposed to be a gentleman in manner, if he knew how to become so. He looked best in his own house, where he was most at his ease and where he had been the master spirit since he was sixteen; for he had good judgment and a determined will, but at the same time he was so good-natured that his authority was not felt to be a tyranny. In him were developed those qualities and talents for which early colonial life is he best training—the readiness, the promptitude, the quickness of resource, the capacity for judging rightly and for acting effectively in new and untried circumstances, the quick eye and the skilful hand. There was a natural dignity about him that made nothing he did appear mean or trivial labour. None of the family had so much of this natural dignity, but they all had it more or less; and it was singular that Jessie and Allan, who