cent humour. Danvers attributed the fun
to her mistress's gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the
country. Redworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy
hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, as she ranged high and low, now
capriciously generalizing, now dropping bolt upon things of passage--the
postillion jogging from rum to gin, the rustics baconly agape, the
horse-kneed ostlers. She touched them to the life in similes and
phrases; and next she was aloft, derisively philosophizing, but with
a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of her irony in
mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments at the inn of the county
market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to manner
and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes she made
memorable to him. She spoke of everything tolerantly, just naming it in
a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed: their host's ready
acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff
he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the
phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the
pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments;
the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for
the exercise of a native inventive genius--these were reviewed in quips
of metaphor.

'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.

'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.

'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'

'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
individual.'

'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'

'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms--a
curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'

Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing
in his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow
concerning potation.

'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'

Habit enabled him to gain his seat.

'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phras