panion at the breakfast-table, as possessed of
"all the cardinal virtues, and counting for nothing." I can do little
more than offer my humble testimony to the truthfulness of Miss
Halcombe's sketch of the old lady's character. Mrs. Vesey looked the
personification of human composure and female amiability. A calm
enjoyment of a calm existence beamed in drowsy smiles on her plump,
placid face. Some of us rush through life, and some of us saunter
through life. Mrs. Vesey SAT through life. Sat in the house, early and
late; sat in the garden; sat in unexpected window-seats in passages;
sat (on a camp-stool) when her friends tried to take her out walking;
sat before she looked at anything, before she talked of anything,
before she answered Yes, or No, to the commonest question--always with
the same serene smile on her lips, the same vacantly-attentive turn of
the head, the same snugly-comfortable position of her hands and arms,
under every possible change of domestic circumstances. A mild, a
compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by
any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since
the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is
engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions,
that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to
distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at
the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain
my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when
Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences
of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.

"Now, Mrs. Vesey," said Miss Halcombe, looking brighter, sharper, and
readier than ever, by contrast with the undemonstrative old lady at her
side, "what will you have? A cutlet?"

Mrs. Vesey crossed her dimpled hands on the edge of the table, smiled
placidly, and said, "Yes, dear."

"What is that opposite Mr. Hartright? Boiled chicken, is it not? I
thought you liked boiled chicken better than cutlet, Mrs. Vesey?"

Mrs. Vesey took her dimpled hands off the edge of the table and crossed
them on her lap instead; nodded contemplatively at the boiled chicken,
and said, "Yes, dear."

"Well, but which will you have, to-day? Shall Mr. Hartright give you
some chicken? or shall I give you some cutlet?"

Mrs. Vesey put one of her dimpled hands back agai