oking girls--did the honours.
While I was making my bows to them, Miss Bellew came forward, and with
an eye bright with pleasure held out her hand towards me.

'I told you, Mr. Hinton, we should meet in the west. Have I been as good
a prophetess in saying that you would like it?'

'If it afforded me but this one minute,' said I, in a half-whisper.

'Dinner!' said the servant, and at the same moment that scene of
pleasant confusion ensued that preludes the formal descent of a party to
the dining-room.

The host had gracefully tucked a large lady under his arm, beside whose
towering proportions he looked pretty much like what architects call 'a
lean-to,' superadded to a great building. He turned his eye towards me
to go and do likewise, with a significant glance at a heaving mass of
bugles and ostrich feathers that sat panting on a sofa. I parried the
stroke, however, by drawing Miss Bellow's arm within mine, while I
resigned the post of honour to my little friend the Major.

The dinner passed off like all other dinners. There was the same routine
of eating and drinking, and pretty much the same ritual of table-talk.
As a kind of commentary on the superiority of natural gifts over the
affected and imitated graces of society, I could not help remarking that
those things which figured on the table of homely origin were actually
luxurious, while the exotic resources of the cookery were, in every
instance, miserable failures. Thus the fish was excellent, and the
mutton perfect, while the _fricandeau_ was atrocious, and the _petits
pates_ execrable.

Should my taste be criticised, that with a lovely girl beside me, for
whom I already felt a strong attachment, I could thus set myself to
criticise the cookery, in lieu of any other more agreeable occupation,
let my apology be, that my reflection was an apropos, called forth by
comparing Louisa Bellew with her cousins the Dillons. I have said they
were handsome girls; they were more--they were beautiful. They had
all that fine pencilling of the eyebrow, that deep, square orbit, so
characteristically Irish, which gives an expression to the eye, whatever
be its colour, of inexpressible softness; their voices too, albeit the
accent was provincial, were soft and musical, and their manners quiet
and ladylike--yet, somehow, they stood immeasurably apart from her.

I have already ventured on one illustration from the cookery, may I take
another from the cellar? How often in wines