enough, and
leavings: only he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show
that he wished no savings.

Wine he had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits;
but the sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I
remember--"British beverage," he would say! "Push about, my boys;"
"Drink to your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre draught a toast
must ensue, or a song. All the forms of good liquor were there, with
none of the effects wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear
a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, with beams of
generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of the table
corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence; tipsy upon
words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian
encouragements.

We had our songs--"Why, Soldiers, Why"--and the "British
Grenadiers"--in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both
the daughters sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme--the masters
he had given them--the "no-expence" which he spared to accomplish them
in a science "so necessary to young women." But then--they could not
sing "without the instrument."

Sacred, and by me, never-to-be violated, Secrets of Poverty! Should
I disclose your honest aims at grandeur, your make-shift efforts
of magnificence? Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of
the bunch be extant; thrummed by a thousand ancestral thumbs; dear,
cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa! Without mention of mine, be dumb,
thou thin accompanier of her thinner warble! A veil be spread over
the dear delighted face of the well-deluded father, who now haply
listening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when
she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings of
that slender image of a voice.

We were not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far,
but as far as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well; had good
grounds to go upon. In _the cottage_ was a room, which tradition
authenticated to have been the same in which Glover, in his occasional
retirements, had penned the greater part of his Leonidas. This
circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the present inmates,
that I could discover, appeared ever to have met with the poem in
question. But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the
anecdote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It
diffused a learned air through the apartment, the little side