"Just listen to him!"

I listened, and heard the refrain of the Whigs' favourite song,--

"Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us--"

"Disgusting stuff!" said Father, with some stronger words which I know
my Aunt Kezia would not let me put down if she were looking. "Where did
the fellow get hold of it? His father is a decent Tory enough. What is
he at now? Listen, girls."

Ambrose's tune had changed to,--

"King George he was born in the month of October,--
'Tis a sin for a subject that month to be sober!"

"I'll forbid him my house!" cries Father, starting up. "I'll send a
bullet through his head! I'll October him, and sober him too, if he has
not a care! Fan! Where's Fan? Go to the spinnet, girl, and sing me a
right good Tory song, to take the taste of that abominable stuff out of
my mouth."

"Nay, Brother," saith my Aunt Kezia, who was pinning a piece of work on
the table, "surely a man may use respect to the powers that be, though
they be not the powers he might wish to be?"

"`Powers that be!'" saith Father. "Powers that shouldn't be, you mean.
I'll tell you what, Kezia,--you may have been bred a Tory, but you were
born a Puritan. Whereon earth you got it--! As for that fellow, I'll
forbid him my house. `King George,' forsooth! Let me hear one of you
call the Elector of Hanover by that name, and I'll--I'll--. Come along,
Fan, and give me a Tory song."

So Fanny sat down to the spinnet, and played the new song that all the
Tories are so fond of. How often she made Britain arise from out the
azure waves, I am sure I don't know, but she, and Father with her, sang
it so many times that all that day I had "Britons never shall be
slaves!" ringing in my ears till I heartily wished they would be slaves
and have done with it.

At night, when we were going to bed, after Father had blessed us, Hatty
runs round to his back and whispers in his ear.

"Don't send Ambrose Catterall away, there's a good Father!" says she:
"there will be two of us old maids as it is."

Father laughed, and pinched Hatty's ear. So I saw my gentlewoman had
been thinking the same thing I had. But I don't think she ought to have
said it out.

Stay, now! Why should it be worse to say things than to think them? Is
it as bad to think them as to say them? Oh dear! but if one were for
ever sifting one's thoughts in that way,--why, it would be just
dreadful! Not many people are careful a