s to travel up to
Town in the train of my Lord and Lady Salop, by easy stages and long
halts; otherwise she must have hired servants, or carried pistols, and
been prepared to use them, in the mail. Fortunately the Salops' chariots
and gigs did not start till the afternoon, so that Mistress Betty had
the morning to spend with her new friends, and she was delighted to
bestow it on them; though my Lord and Lady and their satellites were
perpetually sending lacqueys with compliments, conveniences, and little
offerings to court Mistress Betty,--the star in the plenitude of her
lustre, who might emulate Polly Peacham, and be led to the altar by
another enslaved Duke of Bolton.

How pleasant Mistress Betty was with the girls! Upon the whole, she
slighted "the Justice," as she had dubbed him. She saw with her quick
eyes that he was something superior; but then she saw many men quite as
well-looking, well-endowed, well-mannered, and with as fair intellects,
and more highly cultivated than he.

But she did not often find a pair of unsophisticated little girls won to
her by her frankness and kindness, and dazzled by her goodness and
greatness. How she awoke Fiddy's laugh with the Chit-Chat Club and the
Silence Stakes. What harmless, diverting stories she told them of high
life--how she had danced at Ranelagh, sailed upon the Thames, eaten her
bun at Chelsea, mounted one of the eight hundred favours which cost a
guinea a piece when Lady Die became a countess, and called upon Lady
Petersham, in her deepest mourning, when she sat in her state-bed
enveloped in crape, with her children and grandchildren in a row at her
feet! And then she told that she was born in a farmhouse like that on
the hill, and would like to know if they roasted groats and played at
shovelboard there still; and ended by showing them her little silver
tankard, which her godfather the jolly miller had given her, and out of
which her elder sister, who had never taken kindly to tea, had drunk
her ale and her aniseed water. And Fiddy and Prissy had each a draught
of milk out of it, to boast of for the rest of their lives, as if they
had sipped caudle out of the caudle-cup at a royal heir's christening.

Mistress Betty made the girls talk, too,--of their garden, the old
parish clerk, the housekeeper at Larks' Hall, granny, madam, the vicar,
and, to his face, of Uncle Rowland, his horses and colts, his cows and
calves, his pictures and cabinets. They spoke also of Fo