it to me when the
fish came round, and _I'm dying to hear the end of it_.'" This was on
all hands allowed to have been a most ingenious reply; and I said I
thought she deserved to be highly complimented for such graceful
dexterity in falsehood: to which she answered, "Oh, well, my dear, it's
all very fine; but if ever you get the truth, depend upon it you won't
like it"--a retort which turned the laugh completely against me, and
sent her ladyship off with flying colors; and certainly there was no
want of tolerably severe sincerity in that speech of hers.

Lady Morley's great vivacity of manner and very peculiar voice added not
a little to the drollery of her sallies.

A very conceited, effeminate, and absurd man coming into a room where
she was one evening, and beginning to comb his hair, she exclaimed, "La!
what's that! Look there! There's a mermaid!"

Frederick Byng told me that he was escorting her once in a crowded
public assembly, when she sat down on a chair from which another woman
had just risen and walked away. "Do you know whose place you have just
taken?" asked he. Something significant in his voice and manner arrested
her attention, when, looking at him for an instant with wide-open eyes,
she suddenly jumped up, exclaiming, "Bless my heart, don't tell me so!
_Predecessor!_" Lord Morley, before marrying her, had been divorced from
his first wife, who had just vacated the seat taken by his second, at
the assembly to which they had both gone.

On the occasion of my acting at Plymouth, Lady Morley pressed me very
kindly to go and stay some days with her at Soltram, her place near there:
this I was unable to do, but drove over to see her, when, putting on a
white apron, to "sustain," as she said, "the character," she took me,
housekeeper fashion, through the rooms; stopping before her own charming
watercolor drawings, with such comments as, "Landscape,--capital
performance, by Frances Countess of Morley;" "Street in a foreign town, by
Frances Countess of Morley,--a piece highly esteemed by _connyshures_;"
"Outside of a church, by Frances Countess of Morley,--supposed by good
judges to be her _shiff duver_," etc....

I have just had a visit from that pretty Miss Mordaunt who acted with me
at the St. James's Theatre, and who tells me that her sister, Mrs.
Nisbett, was cheated at the Liverpool theatre precisely as I was; but
she has a brother who is a lawyer, who does not mean to let the matter
rest without so