The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 199: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XVIII THE MYSTERIES OF THE PAST HERE we must interrupt the regular course of our narrative to chronicle certain events necessary to the elucidation of the mysteries belonging to the past. Some four and twenty years previous to the period of which we have been writing, there was a family consisting of four sisters, named Halkin, residing at a short distance from the cathedral city of Rochester. Their Christian names were Lydia, Anne, Melissa, and Lilian. They had been left orphans at a somewhat early age, with a moderate income derived from an annuity purchased in the stock of some public company. Lydia, the eldest, was the only one of the four that had no claim to the possession of beauty, but in compensation for this absence of personal charms she possessed an amiable heart, an excellent disposition, and the purest principles of rectitude and virtue. Her three sisters, Anne, Melissa, and Lilian, were endowed with a rare loveliness, but, on the other hand, they were wanting in sound moral stamina. They had been well educated and genteelly brought up, and their accomplishments as well as their polished breeding qualified them all to move in the best society. The extraordinary beauty of Anne, Melissa, and Lilian might also have justified them in the hope of forming good matrimonial alliances; but the giddy flirtations into which they were led with some young officers in garrison at Chat- ham (which town joins Rochester) materially damaged their character for prudence and propriety, and not only caused them to be spoken lightly of by many of their acquaintances, but also to be excluded from the parties given by those families whom they had been accustomed to visit. Lydia, 177 (C(O) nn) GDoOo So! in