Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/204

192 house so dear for her sisters' sake, and where the garden and shrubbery, which she could see from her windows, were full of precious associations.

But a serious evil was growing up in her household. Her sisters had always attended to domestic matters, and set her at liberty for her literary and charitable undertakings, and she was unused to housekeeping or to the control of servants—when Patty's death left all upon her hands, when already past three score and ten. Her disposition had always been to shrink from administering rebuke; and a house where there was continual resort of visitors, and likewise of poor from all her parishes, was such as to need an active supervision that was impossible from a mistress so aged and so often confined to her room (though apparently the visitor quoted above must have been mistaken in thinking she had been nine years upstairs). The waste was such that she found in 1826 that she had exceeded her income in the two past years by £300, and had to trench on her capital. She wished to sell the reversion of Barley Wood, and to remain to the last near the graves of her sisters, in a place to which she was so much attached, while she submitted to the wastefulness and extravagance of the servants as a chastisement on her incompetence, which affected no one's interest but her own. However, in 1828, in her eighty-third year discoveries were made which showed that the mischief went far beyond mere waste and idleness, and that