he practical
men he seemed leagued hand and heart.

When Hunsden is staying alone at the Wood (which seldom happens) he
generally finds his way two or three times a week to Daisy Lane. He has
a philanthropic motive for coming to smoke his cigar in our porch on
summer evenings; he says he does it to kill the earwigs amongst the
roses, with which insects, but for his benevolent fumigations, he
intimates we should certainly be overrun. On wet days, too, we are
almost sure to see him; according to him, it gets on time to work
me into lunacy by treading on my mental corns, or to force from Mrs.
Crimsworth revelations of the dragon within her, by insulting the memory
of Hofer and Tell.

We also go frequently to Hunsden Wood, and both I and Frances relish a
visit there highly. If there are other guests, their characters are
an interesting study; their conversation is exciting and strange; the
absence of all local narrowness both in the host and his chosen society
gives a metropolitan, almost a cosmopolitan freedom and largeness to the
talk. Hunsden himself is a polite man in his own house: he has, when he
chooses to employ it, an inexhaustible power of entertaining guests; his
very mansion too is interesting, the rooms look storied, the
passages legendary, the low-ceiled chambers, with their long rows of
diamond-paned lattices, have an old-world, haunted air: in his travels
he has collected stores of articles of VERTU, which are well and
tastefully disposed in his panelled or tapestried rooms: I have seen
there one or two pictures, and one or two pieces of statuary which many
an aristocratic connoisseur might have envied.

When I and Frances have dined and spent an evening with Hunsden, he
often walks home with us. His wood is large, and some of the timber
is old and of huge growth. There are winding ways in it which, pursued
through glade and brake, make the walk back to Daisy Lane a somewhat
long one. Many a time, when we have had the benefit of a full moon,
and when the night has been mild and balmy, when, moreover, a certain
nightingale has been singing, and a certain stream, hid in alders, has
lent the song a soft accompaniment, the remote church-bell of the one
hamlet in a district of ten miles, has tolled midnight ere the lord of
the wood left us at our porch. Free-flowing was his talk at such hours,
and far more quiet and gentle than in the day-time and before numbers.
He would then forget politics and discussion, a