Mary Howitt - v. 1 Author:Mary Botham Howitt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The arrangement of the home life would have been excellent had the father-in-law been a different character. His peculiar temper, ignorance of life outside his n... more »arrow circle, and inability to allow of dissimilarity of habits and THE HOME AT UTTOXETEK. opinions, made him undervalue a daughter-in-law from a great distance, who had chiefly lived among people of the world, and who after joining the Society had become accustomed to the more polished usages of the Friends in Cornwall and South Wales. She came as an alien amongst her husband's kindred ; for the little intercourse between the different parts of England made people meet almost as foreigners. Hercast of mind, manners, speech, the tone of her voice, even the style of her plain dress, were different from theirs. She was considered by the half-brothers, who remained irreconcilable, and their sons and daughters-in-law, to be "high," and was nicknamed by them "The Duchess." She found, however, a sympathiser in the wife of her husband's cousin, John Shipley, a native of Kendal, whose comeliness substantiated the popular toast of the day, "A Kendal woman." Ann Shipley had herself endured sufficient loneliness of heart to enter into the feelings of the new-comer. The one really unfortunate circumstance in my mother's relationship to her father-in-law was her nervous sensibility to strong odours, which brought on intense headaches that affected her eyesight. His occupation of drying and pulverising herbs, by which the house was often filled with pungent smells and impalpable stinging dust, was not only offensive to her, but productive of intense pain. The old herb-doctor, who could not induce her to try his headache-snuff, was obdurate, and made no attempt to abate the nuisance. In September 1797 a little daughter was...« less