.

"Her knowledge is most astonishing; but the most astonishing part of all
is how she came by that knowledge. It should seem, to listen to her, as
if at some time of her life she must have listened herself; and yet her
countryman declares that in the forty years he has known her, no such
event has occurred; and she knows new news, too! It must be
intuition!...

"The very weather is not a safe subject. Her memory is a perpetual
register of hard frosts and long droughts, and high winds and terrible
storms, with all the evils that followed in their train, and all the
personal events connected with them; so that, if you happen to remark
that clouds are come up and you fear it may rain, she replies: 'Ay, it
is just such a morning as three-and-thirty years ago, when my poor
cousin was married--you remember my cousin Barbara; she married
so-and-so, the son of so-and-so;' and then comes the whole pedigree of
the bridegroom, the amount of the settlements, and the reading and
signing them overnight; a description of the wedding-dresses in the
style of Sir Charles Grandison, and how much the bride's gown cost per
yard; the names, residences, and a short subsequent history of the
bridesmaids and men, the gentleman who gave the bride away, and the
clergyman who performed the ceremony, with a learned antiquarian
digression relative to the church; then the setting out in procession;
the marriage, the kissing, the crying, the breakfasting, the drawing the
cake through the ring, and, finally, the bridal excursion, which brings
us back again, at an hour's end, to the starting-post, the weather, and
the whole story of the sopping, the drying, the clothes-spoiling, the
cold-catching, and all the small evils of a summer shower. By this time
it rains, and she sits down to a pathetic see-saw of conjectures on the
chance of Mrs. Smith's having set out for her daily walk, or the
possibility that Dr. Brown may have ventured to visit his patients in
his gig, and the certainty that Lady Green's new housemaid would come
from London on the outside of the coach....

"I wonder, if she had happened to be married, how many husbands she
would have talked to death. It is certain that none of her relatives are
long-lived, after she comes to reside with them. Father, mother, uncle,
sister, brother, two nephews, and one niece, all these have
successively passed away, though a healthy race, and with no visible
disorder--except--But we must not be uncharit