TJie Real Charlotte. 179 



Christmas, on account of the mistletoe ; and one in July, 

 on account of the raspberries, for which her garden was 

 justly famous. This, it need scarcely be said, was the rasp- 

 berry party, and accordingly when the afternoon had brought 

 a cessation of the drizzling rain, Miss Ada and Miss Flossie 

 Beattie might have been seen standing among the wet over- 

 arching raspberry canes, devoured by midges, scarlet from 

 the steamy heat, and pestered by that most maddening of 

 all created things, the common fly, but, nevertheless, filling 

 basket after basket with fruit. Miss May and Miss Carrie 

 spent a long and arduous day in the kitchen making tartlets, 

 brewing syrupy lemonade, and decorating cakes with pink 

 and white sugar devices and mottos archly stimulative of 

 conversation. Upon Mrs. Beattie and her two remaining 

 daughters devolved the task of arranging the drawing-room 

 chairs in a Christy minstrel circle, and borrowing extra tea- 

 cups from their obliging neighbour, Mrs. Lynch ; while Mr. 

 Beattie absented himself judiciously until his normal five 

 o'clock dinner hour, when he returned to snatch a per- 

 functory meal at a side table in the hall, his womenkind, 

 after their wont, decUning anything more substantial than 

 nomadic cups of tea, brewed in the kitchen tea-pot, and 

 drunk standing, like the Queen's health. 



But by eight o'clock all preparations were completed, and 

 the young ladies were in the drawing-room, attired alike in 

 white muslin and rose-coloured sashes, with faces pink and 

 glossy from soap and water. In Lismoyle, punctuality was 

 observed at all entertainments, not as a virtue but as a 

 pleasure, and at half-past eight the little glaring drawing- 

 room had rather more people in it than it could con- 

 veniently hold. Mrs. Beattie had trawled Lismoyle and its 

 environs with the purest impartiality ; no one was invidiously 

 omitted, not even young Mr. Redmond the solicitor's clerk, 

 who came in thick boots and a suit of dress clothes so much 

 too big for him as to m.ake his trousers look like twin 

 concertinas, and also to suggest the more massive pro- 

 portions of his employer, Mr. Lynch. In this assemblage, 

 Mrs. Baker, in her celebrated maroon velvet, was a star of 

 the first magnitude, only excelled by Miss Mullen, whose 

 arrival with her cousin was, in a way, the event of the 

 evening. Everyone knew that Miss Fitzpatrick had re- 



