daughters have three gowns
where I have one; and who, though they are waited on but by a man and a
couple of maids, I know eat and drink a thousand times better than we
do with our scraps of cold meat on our plate, and our great flaunting,
trapesing, impudent, lazy lacqueys!"

"He! he! glad I dine at the palace, and not at home!" said Mr. Will.
(Mr. Will, through his aunt's interest with Count Puffendorff, Groom
of the Royal {and Serene Electoral} Powder-Closet, had one of the many
small places at Court, that of Deputy Powder.)

"Why should I not be happy without any title except my own?" continued
Lady Frances. "Many people are. I dare say they are even happy in
America."

"Yes!--with a mother-in-law who is a perfect Turk and Tartar, for all I
hear--with Indian war-whoops howling all around you and with a danger
of losing your scalp, or of being eat up by a wild beast every time you
went to church."

"I wouldn't go to church," said Lady Fanny.

"You'd go with anybody who asked you, Fan!" roared out Mr. Will: "and
so would old Maria, and so would any woman, that's the fact." And Will
laughed at his own wit.

"Pray, good folks, what is all your merriment about?" here asked Madame
Bernstein, peeping in on her relatives from the tapestried door which
led into the gallery where their conversation was held.

Will told her that his mother and sister had been having a fight (which
was not a novelty, as Madame Bernstein knew), because Fanny wanted to
marry their cousin, the wild Indian, and my lady Countess would not let
her. Fanny protested against this statement. Since the very first day
when her mother had told her not to speak to the young gentleman, she
had scarcely exchanged two words with him. She knew her station better.
She did not want to be scalped by wild Indians, or eat up by bears.

Madame de Bernstein looked puzzled. "If he is not staying for you, for
whom is he staying?" she asked. "At the houses to which he has been
carried, you have taken care not to show him a woman that is not a
fright or in the nursery; and I think the boy is too proud to fall in
love with a dairymaid, Will."

"Humph! That is a matter of taste, ma'am," says Mr. William, with a
shrug of his shoulders.

"Of Mr. William Esmond's taste, as you say; but not of yonder boy's. The
Esmonds of his grandfather's nurture, sir, would not go a-courting in
the kitchen."

"Well, ma'am, every man to his taste, I say again. A fellow might go
f