“Something that Nelly Trotter” (Trotting Nelly, as the company called her) “brought from a sketching gentleman that lives at the woman’s” (thus bluntly did the upstart minx describe the reverend Mrs. Margaret Dods) “at the Cleikum of Aultoun yonder”— A name, by the way, which the inn had acquired from the use which the saint upon the sign-post was making of his pastoral crook.

“Indeed, Dinah?” said Mr. Winterblossom, gravely taking out his spectacles, and wiping them before he opened the roll of paper; “some boy’s daubing, I suppose, whose pa and ma wish to get him into the Trustees’ School, and so are beating about for a little interest. — But I am drained dry — I put three lads in last season; and if it had not been my particular interest with the secretary, who asks my opinion now and then, I could not have managed it. But giff-gaff, say I. — Eh! What, in the devil’s name, is this? — Here is both force and keeping — Who can this be, my lady? — Do but see the sky-line — why, this is really a little bit — an exquisite little bit — Who the devil can it be? and how can he have stumbled upon the dog-hole in the Old Town, and the snarling b —— I beg your ladyship ten thousand pardons — that kennels there?”

“I dare say, my lady,” said a little miss of fourteen, her eyes growing rounder and rounder, and her cheeks redder and redder, as she found herself speaking, and so many folks listening —“O la! I dare say it is the same gentleman we met one day in the Low-wood walk, that looked like a gentleman, and yet was none of the company, and that you said was a handsome man.”

“I did not say handsome, Maria,” replied her ladyship; “ladies never say men are handsome — I only said he looked genteel and interesting.”

“And that, my lady,” said the young parson, bowing and smiling, “is, I will be judged by the company, the more flattering compliment of the two — We shall be jealous of this Unknown presently.”

“Nay, but,” continued the sweetly communicative Maria, with some real and some assumed simplicity, “your ladyship forgets — for you said presently after, you were sure he was no gentleman, for he did not run after you with your glove which you had dropped — and so I went back myself to find your ladyship’s glove, and he never offered to help me, and I saw him closer than your ladyship did, and I am sure he is handsome, though he is not very civil.”

“You speak a little too much and too loud, miss,” said Lady Penelope, a natural blush reinforcing the nuance of rouge by which it was usually superseded.

“What say you to that, Squire Mowbray?” said the elegant Sir Bingo Binks.

“A fair challenge to the field, Sir Bingo,” answered the squire; “when a lady throws down the gauntlet, a gentleman may throw the handkerchief.”