I can not believe that this fiddling is work for persons of
fashion."

"And King David who played the harp, my dear?"

"I wish my papa would read him more, and not speak about him in that
way," said Mrs. Warrington.

"Nay, my dear, it was but by way of illustration," the father replied
gently. It was Colonel Esmond's nature, as he has owned in his own
biography, always to be led by a woman; and, his wife dead, he coaxed
and dandled and spoiled his daughter; laughing at her caprices, but
humouring them; making a joke of her prejudices, but letting them have
their way; indulging, and perhaps increasing, her natural imperiousness
of character, though it was his maxim that we can't change dispositions
by meddling, and only make hypocrites of our children by commanding them
over-much.

At length the time came when Mr. Esmond was to have done with the
affairs of this life, and he laid them down as if glad to be rid of
their burthen. We must not ring in an opening history with tolling
bells, or preface it with a funeral sermon. All who read and heard
that discourse, wondered where Parson Broadbent of Jamestown found the
eloquence and the Latin which adorned it. Perhaps Mr. Dempster knew, the
boys' Scotch tutor, who corrected the proofs of the oration, which was
printed, by desire of his Excellency and many persons of honour, at Mr.
Franklin's press in Philadelphia. No such sumptuous funeral had ever
been seen in the country as that which Madam Esmond Warrington ordained
for her father, who would have been the first to smile at that pompous
grief. The little lads of Castlewood, almost smothered in black trains
and hatbands, headed the procession, and were followed by my Lord
Fairfax from Greenway Court, by his Excellency the Governor of Virginia
(with his coach), by the Randolphs, the Careys, the Harrisons, the
Washingtons, and many others, for the whole county esteemed the departed
gentleman, whose goodness, whose high talents, whose benevolence
and unobtrusive urbanity had earned for him the just respect of his
neighbours. When informed of the event, the family of Colonel Esmond's
stepson, the Lord Castlewood of Hampshire in England, asked to be at the
charges of the marble slab which recorded the names and virtues of his
lordship's mother and her husband; and after due time of preparation,
the monument was set up, exhibiting the arms and coronet of the Esmonds,
supported by a little chubby group of weeping cherubs, and