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You're all to do just as she tells you, and obey her just as if she were I. I see that Tom's got the buggy all harnessed up. It's lucky they were able to save their wagons and their horses, isn't it!" "What are you going to do in Cranford!" asked Dolly. "Won't you tell us, Miss Eleanor?" "No, I won't, Dolly," said Eleanor, laughing.
The original of this country village, which is given over to spinsters, is undoubtedly Knutsford, in Cheshire, where Mrs. Gaskell had spent her childhood. The sympathy, the keen observation, and the gentle humor with which the small affairs of a country village are described make Cranford one of the most delightful stories in the English language. We are indebted to Mrs.
He was an old bachelor, but as afraid of matrimonial reports getting abroad about him as any girl of eighteen: and he would rush into a shop or dive down an entry, sooner than encounter any of the Cranford ladies in the street; and, as for the Preference parties, I did not wonder at his not accepting invitations to them.
"I believe he was robbed, just as Betty told me, and he is ashamed to own it; and, to be sure, it was very silly of him to be robbed just at his own door; I daresay he feels that such a thing won't raise him in the eyes of Cranford society, and is anxious to conceal it but he need not have tried to impose upon me, by saying I must have heard an exaggerated account of some petty theft of a neck of mutton, which, it seems, was stolen out of the safe in his yard last week; he had the impertinence to add, he believed that that was taken by the cat.
You'll have lots more orders than you can fill." "I'm wonderin' right now, ma'am, how we'll be able to make a hundred pounds of butter a week." "I thought of that, too," said Eleanor, "and I bought half a dozen more cows for you, right there in Cranford. They're pretty good cows, and if they're well fed, and properly taken care of, they'll be just what you want."
Cousin Tracy went to great lengths to be entertaining, and Cousin Honora and Cousin Augusta were so hospitable in their quaint surroundings that Kitty whispered to Blue Bonnet: "I feel as if they had stepped out of a book Cranford, or something!" An announcement that Blue Bonnet scarcely knew whether to take as a compliment or not.
There was all the more time for me to hear old-world stories from Miss Pole, while she sat knitting, and I making my father's shirts. I always took a quantity of plain sewing to Cranford; for, as we did not read much, or walk much, I found it a capital time to get through my work.
Things that many would despise, and actions which it seemed scarcely worth while to perform, were all attended to in Cranford. Miss Jenkyns stuck an apple full of cloves, to be heated and smell pleasantly in Miss Brown's room; and as she put in each clove she uttered a Johnsonian sentence.
Some months back a conjuror had given a performance in the Cranford Assembly Rooms. By a strange set of circumstances the identity of Signor Brunoni was revealed. He was plain Samuel Brown, who had fallen out of his cart and had to be attended by our doctor. I went to visit the patient and his wife, and learned that she had been India.
I can testify to a magnificent family red silk umbrella, under which a gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used to patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red silk umbrellas in London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in Cranford; and the little boys mobbed it, and called it "a stick in petticoats."
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