He had married early, and had made, in the estimation of his friends and of the county generally, an excellent choice of a wife in the person of the eldest daughter of a neighbouring squire.  The marriage was apparently a very happy one; for the bride brought her husband a fair face, a loving heart, and a good fortune, and entertained his friends with due courtesy and cordiality.  Moreover, she neither thwarted his tastes nor squandered his money; while he, on his part, pursued his hunting, shooting, and fishing, and his occasional magisterial duties, with due consideration for his wife's domestic and social engagements, so that their married life ran its course with as little friction or creaking as could reasonably be expected.  Then there came, in due time, the children: first, a little girl, the object of her mother's passionate love, and as dear to her father as the mistake of her not having been a boy would allow her to be; then, after an interval of three years, came a son.