r sit down with us. She did it with that
easiness which is peculiar to women of sense; and to keep up the good
humour she had brought in with her, turned her raillery upon me. "Mr.
Bickerstaff, you remember you followed me one night from the play-house;
suppose you should carry me thither to-morrow night, and lead me into
the front box." This put us into a long field of discourse about the
beauties, who were mothers to the present, and shined in the boxes
twenty years ago. I told her, "I was glad she had transferred so many
of her charms, and I did not question but her eldest daughter was within
half a year of being a Toast."

We were pleasing ourselves with this fantastical preferment of the young
lady, when on a sudden we were alarmed with the noise of a drum, and
immediately entered my little godson to give me a point of war. His
mother, between laughing and chiding, would have put him out of the
room; but I would not part with him so. I found upon conversation with
him, though he was a little noisy in his mirth, that the child had
excellent parts, and was a great master of all the learning on the other
side eight years old. I perceived him a very great historian in AEsop's
Fables: but he frankly declared to me his mind, that he did not delight
in that learning, because he did not believe they were true; for
which reason I found he had very much turned his studies for about a
twelve-month past, into the lives and adventures of Don Bellianis of
Greece, Guy of Warwick, the Seven Champions, and other historians of
that age. I could not but observe the satisfaction the father took in
the forwardness of his son; and that these diversions might turn to some
profit, I found the boy had made remarks which might be of service
to him during the course of his whole life. He would tell you the
mis-managements of John Hickathrift, find fault with the passionate
temper in Bevis of Southampton, and loved Saint George for being the
champion of England; and by this means had his thoughts insensibly
moulded into the notions of discretion, virtue, and honour. I was
extolling his accomplishments, when the mother told me that the little
girl who led me in this morning was in her way a better scholar than he.
"Betty," says she, "deals chiefly in fairies and sprites, and sometimes
in a winter-night will terrify the maids with her accounts, till they
are afraid to go up to bed."

I sat with them till it was very late, sometimes in merry, s