appeared _en negligee_, as they say in the _Morning
Post_, her clothes hung straight down in perpendicular descent, so that
she looked exactly like the canvass air funnels that you see in a
steam-boat: and there were no outs and ins, or ups and downs, about her
figure from top to toe; and I found it impossible, for a particular
reason, to supply these deficiencies by the exercise of my ingenuity in
description And that particular reason was this,--that she did it
herself. Lord! what a change took place on Miss Sophia as you saw her
gliding about the room like a half emptied pillow-case in the morning,
and the grand and _distinguee_ (_Morning Post_ again) individual that
choked up all the doorways, and occupied whole sofas, when you met her
at a party at night. Then there were such flounces and tucks, and
furbelows,--she sailed through the room enveloped in such awful
circumgyrations of muslin--so pulled in at the waist, and so inflated
every where else, that she looked--as you saw only her neck and
shoulders emerging from the enormous circle in which the rest of her was
buried--like an intrepid aeronaut who has fallen by some accident through
a hole in the balloon, and you were lost in calculations of the length
of darning-needle that would be needed to reach to the _vera
superficies_. Now if I invent, I like to have the honour of the
invention entirely to myself; and I found it impracticable to extract a
heroine from seven or eight spring gauze petticoats, and a roll of
millinery below the waist, that looked like a military cloak rolled up
on the crupper of a life-guardsman's saddle. Then poor Martha Brown was
too young, and at that time too bashful, for a heroine; and besides,
there was no getting over the blot on her birth. Theodore Fitzhedingham
could never think of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman
and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm. One day I had
been at work in one of the plantations, and just as I was marking with
my hand-axe a birch tree to be felled, a thought came into my head. I
left the cross half executed, and threw the axe on the bank, hurried
home, and locked myself in the study. Pen and paper were lying before
me, and in a moment I had got deep into the introduction of my heroine.
She was an orphan thrown on Fitzhedingham's care--young, beautiful,
accomplished, but of unknown mysterious parentage--and the _denouement_
to consist in the discovery that her father was----b