o move
into fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young
housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with
the world, would be agreeable to him. His project was that one of his
nieces should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to
reflect on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now
and in the time to come. Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite
unctuously. Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old
crabbed miser? "Tell her," he said, "there's fruit at stalls at
every street-corner all the year through--oysters and whelks, if she
likes--winkles, lots of pictures in shops--a sight of muslin and silks,
and rides on omnibuses--bands of all sorts, and now and then we can take
a walk to see the military on horseback, if she's for soldiers."
Indeed, he joked quite comically in speaking of the famous
horse-guards--warriors who sit on their horses to be looked at, and do
not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly. "Horse-guards blue,
and horse-guards red," he wrote--"the blue only want boiling." There is
reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not original in him,
but it displayed his character in a fresh light. Of course, if either
of the girls was to go, Dahlia was the person. The farmer commenced
his usual process of sitting upon the idea. That it would be policy
to attach one of the family to this chirping old miser, he thought
incontestable. On the other hand, he had a dread of London, and Dahlia
was surpassingly fair. He put the case to Robert, in remembrance of what
his wife had spoken, hoping that Robert would amorously stop his painful
efforts to think fast enough for the occasion. Robert, however, had
nothing to say, and seemed willing to let Dahlia depart. The only
opponents to the plan were Mrs. Sumfit, a kindly, humble relative of the
farmer's, widowed out of Sussex, very loving and fat; the cook to the
household, whose waist was dimly indicated by her apron-string; and, to
aid her outcries, the silently-protesting Master Gammon, an old man with
the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, the slowest old man of his
time--a sort of foreman of the farm before Robert had come to take
matters in hand, and thrust both him and his master into the background.
Master Gammon remarked emphatically, once and for all, that "he never
had much opinion of London." As he had never visited London, his opinion
was considered th