CHAPTER II.
BY HEAVENS HE HAD BETTER NOT! I must ask the reader to make the acquaintance of Major Grantly of Cosby Lodge, before he is introduced to the family of Mr.Crawley, at their parsonage in Hogglestock.

It has been said that Major Grantly had thrown a favourable eye on Grace Crawley,--by which report occasion was given to all men and women in those parts to hint that the Crawleys, with all their piety and humility, were very cunning, and that one of the Grantlys was,--to say the least of it,--very soft, admitted as it was throughout the county of Barsetshire, that there was no family therein more widely awake to the affairs generally of this world and the next combined, than the family of which Archdeacon Grantly was the respected head and patriarch.

Mrs.
Walker, the most good-natured woman in Silverbridge, had acknowledged to her daughter that she could not understand it,--that she could not see anything at all in Grace Crawley.

Mr.Walker had shrugged his shoulders and expressed a confident belief that Major Grantly had not a shilling of his own beyond his half-pay and his late wife's fortune, which was only six thousand pounds.

Others, who were ill-natured, had declared that Grace Crawley was little better than a beggar, and that she could not possibly have acquired the manners of a gentlewoman.