Scenes and Characters | Page 2

that wave of opinion, my little
craft floated out into the great sea of the public.
Friends, whose kindness astonished me, and fills me with gratitude
when I look back on it, gave me seasonable criticism and pruning, and
finally launched me. My heroes and heroines had arranged themselves

so as to work out a definite principle, and this was enough for us all.
Children's books had not been supposed to require a plot. Miss
Edgeworth's, which I still continue to think gems in their own line, are
made chronicles, or, more truly, illustrations of various truths worked
out upon the same personages. Moreover, the skill of a Jane Austen or a
Mrs. Gaskell is required to produce a perfect plot without doing
violence to the ordinary events of an every-day life. It is all a matter of
arrangement. Mrs. Gaskell can make a perfect little plot out of a sick
lad and a canary bird; and another can do nothing with half a dozen
murders and an explosion; and of arranging my materials so as to build
up a story, I was quite incapable. It is still my great deficiency; but in
those days I did not even understand that the attempt was desirable.
Criticism was a more thorough thing in those times than it has since
become through the multiplicity of books to be hurried over, and it was
often very useful, as when it taught that such arrangement of incident
was the means of developing the leading idea.
Yet, with all its faults, the children, who had been real to me, caught,
chiefly by the youthful sense of fun and enjoyment, the attention of
other children; and the curious semi-belief one has in the phantoms of
one's brain made me dwell on their after life and share my discoveries
with my friends, not, however, writing them down till after the lapse of
all these years the tenderness inspired by associations of early days led
to taking up once more the old characters in The Two Sides of the
Shield; and the kind welcome this has met with has led to the
resuscitation of the crude and inexperienced tale which never pretended
to be more than a mere family chronicle.
C. M. YONGE. 6th October 1886.

CHAPTER I
--THE ELDER SISTER

'Return, and in the daily round Of duty and of love, Thou best wilt find
that patient faith That lifts the soul above.'
Eleanor Mohun was the eldest child of a gentleman of old family, and
good property, who had married the sister of his friend and neighbour,
the Marquis of Rotherwood. The first years of her life were marked by

few events. She was a quiet, steady, useful girl, finding her chief
pleasure in nursing and teaching her brothers and sisters, and her chief
annoyance in her mamma's attempts to make her a fine lady; but before
she had reached her nineteenth year she had learnt to know real anxiety
and sorrow. Her mother, after suffering much from grief at the loss of
her two brothers, fell into so alarming a state of health, that her
husband was obliged immediately to hurry her away to Italy, leaving
the younger children under the care of a governess, and the elder boys
at school, while Eleanor alone accompanied them.
Their absence lasted nearly three years, and during the last winter, an
engagement commenced between Eleanor and Mr. Francis
Hawkesworth, rather to the surprise of Lady Emily, who wondered that
he had been able to discover the real worth veiled beneath a formal and
retiring manner, and to admire features which, though regular, had a
want of light and animation, which diminished their beauty even more
than the thinness and compression of the lips, and the very pale gray of
the eyes.
The family were about to return to England, where the marriage was to
take place, when Lady Emily was attacked with a sudden illness, which
her weakened frame was unable to resist, and in a very few days she
died, leaving the little Adeline, about eight months old, to accompany
her father and sister on their melancholy journey homewards. This loss
made a great change in the views of Eleanor, who, as she considered
the cares and annoyances which would fall on her father, when left to
bear the whole burthen of the management of the children and
household, felt it was her duty to give up her own prospects of
happiness, and to remain at home. How could she leave the tender little
ones to the care of servants--trust her sisters to a governess, and make
her brothers' home yet more dreary? She knew her father to be strong in
sense and firm in judgment, but indolent, indulgent, and inattentive to
details, and she could not