ses; and next she was aloft, derisively
philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of
her irony in mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments at the inn of
the county market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to
manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes
she made memorable to him. She spoke of everything tolerantly, just
naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed: their
host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous
disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep
he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the
anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer
over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea,
milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive
genius--these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.

'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.

'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.

'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'

'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
individual.'

'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'

'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms--a
curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'

Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in
his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning
potation.

'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'

Habit enabled him to gain his seat.

'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a
likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the
frost, to a railway engine. 'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.
Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he
reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the
quick-witted of their speci