Transcribed from the 1889 Macmillan and Co edition by David Priceemail ccx074coventryacukSCENES AND CHARACTERS OR EIGHTEEN MONTHS AT BEECHCROFTPREFACEOf those who are invited to pay a visit to Beechcroft there are somewho honestly acknowledging that amusement is their object will becontent to feel with Lilias conjecture with Jane and get intoscrapes with Phyllis without troubling themselves to extract anymoral from their proceedings and to these the Mohun family wouldonly apologise for having led a very humdrum life during the eighteenmonths spent in their companyThere may however be more unreasonable visitors who professingonly to come as parents and guardians expect entertainment forthemselves as well as instruction for those who had rather it wasout of sightlook for antiques in carved cherrystonesandrequire plot incident and catastrophe in a chronicle of small beerTo these the Mohuns beg respectfully to observe that they hope theirexamples may not be altogether devoid of indirect instruction andlest it should be supposed that they lived without object aim orprinciple they would observe that the maxim which has influenced thedelineation of the different Scenes and Characters is that feelingunguided and unrestrained soon becomes mere selfishness while thesimple endeavour to fulfil each immediate claim of duty may lead tothe highest acts of selfdevotionNEW COURT BEECHCROFT18th JanuaryPREFACE 1886Perhaps this book is an instance to be adduced in support of theadvice I have often given to young authorsnot to print before theythemselves are old enough to do justice to their freshest ideasNot that I can lay claim to its being a production of tender andinteresting youth  It was my second actual publication and Ibelieve I was of age before it appearedbut I see now the failuresthat more experience might have enabled me to avoid and I would notagain have given it to the world if the same characters recurring inanother story had not excited a certain desire to see their firststartIn fact they have been more or less my lifelong companions  Analmost solitary child with periodical visits to the Elysium of alarge family it was natural to dream of other children and theirways and sports till they became almost realities  They took shapewhen my French master set me to write letters for him  The lettersgradually became conversation and narrative and the adventures ofthe family sweetened the toils of French composition  In theexigencies of village school building in those days gone by beforein every placeIt there behoved him to set up the standard of her Gracethe tale was actually printed for private sale as a link betweentranslations of short storiesThis process only stifled the family in my imagination for a timeThey awoke once more with new names but substantially the same andwere my companions in many a solitary walk the results of which werescribbled down in leisure moments to be poured into my mothers everpatient and sympathetic earsAnd then came the impulse to literature for young people given by theexample of that memorable book the Fairy Bower and followed up byAmy Herbert  It was felt that elder children needed something of adeeper tone than the Edgeworthian style yet less directly religiousthan the Sherwood class of books and on that wave of opinion mylittle craft floated out into the great sea of the publicFriends whose kindness astonished me and fills me with gratitudewhen I look back on it gave me seasonable criticism and pruning andfinally launched me  My heroes and heroines had arranged themselvesso as to work out a definite principle and this was enough for usallChildrens books had not been supposed to require a plot  MissEdgeworths which I still continue to think gems in their own lineare made chronicles or more truly illustrations of various truthsworked out upon the same personages  Moreover the skill of a JaneAusten or a Mrs Gaskell is required to produce a perfect plotwithout doing violence to the ordinary events of an everyday lifeIt is all a matter of arrangement  Mrs Gaskell can make a perfectlittle plot out of a sick lad and a canary bird and another can donothing with half a dozen murders and an explosion and of arrangingmy materials so as to build up a story I was quite incapable  It isstill my great deficiency but in those days I did not evenunderstand that the attempt was desirable  Criticism was a morethorough thing in those times than it has since become through themultiplicity of books to be hurried over and it was often veryuseful as when it taught that such arrangement of incident was themeans of developing the leading ideaYet with all its faults the children who had been real to mecaught chiefly by the youthful sense of fun and enjoyment theattention of other children and the curious semibelief one has inthe phantoms of ones brain made me dwell on their after life andshare my discoveries with my friends not however writing them downtill after the lapse of all these years the tenderness inspired byassociations of early days led to taking up once more the oldcharacters in The Two Sides of the Shield and the kind welcome thishas met with has led to the resuscitation of the crude andinexperienced tale which never pretended to be more than a merefamily chronicleC M YONGE6th October 1886CHAPTER ITHE ELDER SISTERReturn and in the daily round  Of duty and of loveThou best wilt find that patient faith  That lifts the soul aboveEleanor Mohun was the eldest child of a gentleman of old family andgood property who had married the sister of his friend andneighbour the Marquis of Rotherwood  The first years of her lifewere marked by few events  She was a quiet steady useful girlfinding her chief pleasure in nursing and teaching her brothers andsisters and her chief annoyance in her mammas attempts to make hera fine lady but before she had reached her nineteenth year she hadlearnt to know real anxiety and sorrow  Her mother after sufferingmuch from grief at the loss of her two brothers fell into soalarming a state of health