Matty had to make a firm
resolve about cutting off any more hair, fearing a premature baldness
during the recruiting season.

Now, Fanny had selected another arm of the service. Her hair was fair; her
eyes blue, laughing, languishing,--mischief-loving blue, with long lashes,
and a look in them that was wont to leave its impression rather longer than
you exactly knew of; then, her figure was _petite_, but perfect; her feet
Canova might have copied; and her hand was a study for Titian; her voice,
too, was soft and musical, but full of that _gaiete de coeur_ that never
fails to charm. While her sister's style was _il penserono_, hers was
_l'allegro_; every imaginable thing, place, or person supplied food for her
mirth, and her sister's lovers all came in for their share. She hunted
with Smith Barry's hounds; she yachted with the Cove Club; she coursed,
practised at a mark with a pistol, and played chicken hazard with all
the cavalry,--for, let it be remarked as a physiological fact, Matilda's
admirers were almost invariably taken from the infantry, while Fanny's
adorers were as regularly dragoons. Whether the former be the romantic
arm of the service, and the latter be more adapted to dull realities, or
whether the phenomenon had any other explanation, I leave to the curious.
Now, this arrangement, proceeding upon that principle which has wrought
such wonders in Manchester and Sheffield,--the division of labor,--was a
most wise and equitable one, each having her one separate and distinct
field of action, interference was impossible; not but that when, as in the
present instance, cavalry was in the ascendant, Fanny would willingly spare
a dragoon or two to her sister, who likewise would repay the debt when
occasion offered.

The mamma--for it is time I should say something of the head of the
family--was an excessively fat, coarse-looking, dark-skinned personage, of
some fifty years, with a voice like a boatswain in a quinsy. Heaven can
tell, perhaps, why the worthy major allied his fortunes with hers, for she
was evidently of a very inferior rank in society, could never have been
aught than downright ugly, and I never heard that she brought him any
money. "Spoiled five," the national amusement of her age and sex in Cork,
scandal, the changes in the army list, the failures in speculation of her
luckless husband, the forlorn fortunes of the girls, her daughters, kept
her in occupation, and her days were passed in one perpetu