s the reading of such old-time story! How the
"proprieties" our grandmothers taught us come drifting back upon the
tide of those buckram conventionalities of the "Dashwoods"![G] Ah,
Marianne, how we once loved you! Ah, Sir John, how we once thought you a
profane swearer!--as you really were.

There are people we know between the covers of Miss Austen: Mrs.
Jennings has a splutter of tease, and crude incivility, and shapeless
tenderness, that you and I see every day;--not so patent and
demonstrative in our friend Mrs. Jones; but the difference is only in
fashion: Mrs. Jennings was in scant petticoats, and Mrs. Jones wears
hoops, thirty springs strong.

How funny, too, the old love-talk! "My beloved Amanda, the charm of your
angelic features enraptures my regard." It is earnest; but it's not the
way those things are done.

And what visions such books recall of the days when they were read,--the
girls in pinafores,--the boys in roundabouts,--the elders looking
languishingly on, when the reader comes to tender passages! And was not
a certain Mary Jane another Ellinor? And was not Louisa (who lived in
the two-story white house on the corner) another Marianne,--gushing,
tender? Yes, by George, she was! (that was the form our boyish oaths
took).

And was not the tall fellow who offered his arm to the girls so gravely,
and saw them home from our evening visits so cavalierly,--was he not
another gay deceiver,--a Lothario, a Willoughby? He could kiss a girl on
the least provocation; he took pay out, for his escort, that way. It was
wonderful,--the fellow's effrontery. It never forsook him. I do not know
about the romance in his family; but he went into the grocery-line, and
has become a contractor now, enormously rich. He offers his arm to
Columbia, who wishes to get home before dark; and takes pay in rifling
her of golden kisses. Yes, by George, he does!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] By an odd coincidence, I observe that Washington made one of his
first shipments of tobacco (after his marriage with Mrs. Custis) upon a
vessel called "The Fair American." Did the ship possibly give a name to
the novel, or the novel a name to the ship?

[B] _Practical Farmer_, by William Ellis. London, 1759.

[C] The eminent geologist, Robert Bakewell, who lived many years later,
wrote of the "Influence of the Soil on Wool," and for that reason,
perhaps, is frequently confounded by agricultural writers with the great
breeder.

[D] Third volume _Stati