ell on the fiddle. This drew
abundance of the young smart fellows of the university to his house, and
that of course engaged his three daughters to take all the pains they
were able to make themselves agreeable. The mother had great hopes that
fine clothes and a jaunty air might marry her daughters to some
gentlemen of tolerable fortunes, and that one of them, at least, might
have a chance of catching a fellow commoner with a thousand or two _per
annum_, for which reason Miss Molly, Miss Jenny, and Miss Alice were all
bred to the dancing school, taught to sing prettily, and to touch the
spinet with an agreeable air. In short, the house was a mansion of
politeness, and except the two brothers, one of which was put out
apprentice to a carpenter, and the other to a shoemaker, there was not a
person to be seen in it who looked, spoke or acted as became them in
their proper station of life. But it is necessary that we should come to
a more particular description.

Old Peter, their father, was a man of mean birth, and of a sort of
accidental education. From his youth up he had lived in Oxford, and from
the time he was able to know anything, within the purlieus of a college,
from whence he had gleaned up a few Latin sentences, scraps of poetry,
and as the masterpiece of his improvements, had acquired a good knack of
punning. All these mighty qualifications were bent to keep a good house,
and drinking two or three quarts of strong ale, accompanied with a song,
and two or three hours' scraping at night. The mother, again, was the
last remnant of a decayed family, who charged its ruin on the Civil
Wars. She was exceedingly puffed up with the notions of her birth, and
the respect that was due to a person not sprung from the vulgar. Her
education had extended no farther than the knowledge of preserving,
pickling and making fricasees, a pretty exact knowledge in the several
kinds of points and a judgment not to be despised in the choice of lace,
silks and ribbons. She affected extravagance that she might not appear
mean, and troublesomely ceremonious that she might not seem to want good
manners. Clothes for herself and her daughters, a good quantity of china
and some other exuberances of a fancy almost turned mad with the love of
finery, made up the circle of what took up her thoughts, the daughters
participating in their parents' tempers. But what was wonderful indeed,
the sons were honest, sober, industrious young men.

In the mi