The Argosy — page 14: what you’re looking at

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

fee: ARGOS Y: FANUARY, 1567. ees Eh P OW EER. tae A PT Re ae THE HATHERLEYS, | i that decade which began with the bombardment of Acre, and closed four years before the Crimean War, the drawing-room of Hatherley House looked very old-fashioned indeed. For in those days, panelled walls, tiled fireplaces, carved oak furniture, and blue china were indications of the owner’s character. Instead of meaning that he swam with the tide, it meant that he fought against it. Instead of betraying him for a worshipper of fashion, it stamped him for a devotee of the past. And in Marleyford, where the Hatherleys had lived for generations, their furniture was as much identified with them as their hereditary nose (a handsome aquiline), er their grand ancestral manner. Their neighbours, prosperous, cheery modern folk, quitting their own plate-glass and gilding, and arriving in that gloomy room, were straightway possessed with a solemn sense of the dignity of the Hatherley tradition. And Mary, the only daughter of the house, sitting in her statuesque beauty, her quaker-like dress, on a straight- backed chair to receive them, seemed hardly nearer to their desires or their habits than a graven saint in a niche, or queen upon a tomb. John, too, the eldest son and the only son at home, with /zs sober, perfect attire, his faultless, marble face, and his reputation for exotic tastes, struck one as a young man whose youth was a polite con- cession to the course of nature, but in no sense a period of immaturity. While the other rich or aspirant inhabitants of the town ransacked the Herald’s office for armorial bearings and blazoned its inventions on the panels of their barouches, Mary rumbled along in a roomy chariot, with nothing but an initial on its chocolate-coloured doors. And while sons of tinkers and grandsons of tailors quitted their native town to blossom into esquires elsewhere, the Hatherleys with VOL. XXXV. B COMIC OOO SS (CO) im