ty paper assured us; and as I may venture to
add, from personal observation, a very fair share of its
disrespectability and blackguardism besides.

After wandering for a short time among these various groups, Leicester
halted us at last in front of one of those old-fashioned
respectable-looking barouches, which one now so seldom sees, in which
were seated a party, who turned out to consist of an uncle and aunt, and
the pair of cousins before alluded to. Hurst and I were duly introduced;
a ceremony which, for my own part, I could have very readily excused,
when I discovered that the only pair of eyes in the party worth
mentioning bestowed their glances almost exclusively on Horace, and any
attempt at cutting into the conversation in that quarter was as
hopeless, apparently, as ungracious. Our friend's taste in the article
of cousins was undeniably correct; Flora Leicester was a most desirable
person to have for a cousin; very pretty, very good-humoured, and (I am
sure she was, though I pretend to no experience of the fact) very
affectionate. If one could have put in any claim of kindred, even in the
third or fourth degree, it would have been a case in which to stickle
hard for the full privileges of relationship. As matters stood, it was
trying to the sensibilities of us unfortunate bystanders, whose cousins
were either ugly or at a distance; for the rest of our new acquaintances
were not interesting. The younger sister was shy and insipid; the squire
like ninety-nine squires in every hundred; and the lady-mother in a
perpetual state of real or affected nervous agitation, to which her own
family were happily insensible, but which taxed a stranger's polite
sympathies pretty heavily. Though constantly in the habit, as she
assured me, of accompanying her husband to run courses, and enjoying the
sport, she was always on the look-out for an accident, and was always
having, as she said, narrow escapes; some indeed so very narrow, that,
according to her own account, they ought _to have had, by every rule of
probability, fatal terminations_. In fact, her tone might have led one
to believe that she looked upon herself as an ill-used woman, in getting
off so easily--at least she was exceedingly angry when the younger
daughter ventured to remark, _en pendant_ to one of her most thrilling
adventures, that "there was no great danger of an upset when the wheel
stuck fast." Not content with putting her head out of the carriage every
fi