knew, and she knew that
we knew; and we knew that she knew that we knew she had been busy all
the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes."

The humor of Mary Russell Mitford, quiet and delectable, must not be
forgotten. We will sympathize with her woes as she describes a
visitation from

THE TALKING LADY.

"Ben Jonson has a play called _The Silent Woman_, who turns out, as
might be expected, to be no woman at all--nothing, as Master Slender
said, but 'a great lubberly boy,' thereby, as I apprehend,
discourteously presuming that a silent woman is a nonentity. If the
learned dramatist, thus happily prepared and predisposed, had happened
to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just
parted with, he might, perhaps, have given us a pendant to his picture
in the talking lady. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice,
which I could not at any time, least of all now; I am too much stunned,
too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just
resting from the fatigue of four days' hard listening--four snowy,
sleety, rainy days; days of every variety of falling weather, all of
them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were
she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out; four days chained by 'sad
civility' to that fireside, once so quiet, and again--cheering
thought!--again I trust to be so when the echo of that visitor's
incessant tongue shall have died away....

"She took us in her way from London to the west of England, and being,
as she wrote, 'not quite well, not equal to much company, prayed that no
other guest might be admitted, so that she might have the pleasure of
our conversation all to herself (_ours!_ as if it were possible for any
of us to slide in a word edgewise!), and especially enjoy the
gratification of talking over old times with the master of the house,
her countryman.'

"Such was the promise of her letter, and to the letter it has been kept.
All the news and scandal of a large county forty years ago, and a
hundred years before, and ever since; all the marriages, deaths, births,
elopements, law-suits, and casualties of her own times, her father's,
grandfather's, great-grandfather's, nephews', and grandnephews', has she
detailed with a minuteness, an accuracy, a prodigality of learning, a
profuseness of proper names, a pedantry of locality, which would excite
the envy of a county historian, a king-at-arms, or even a Scotch
novelist