polite world there in the winter of 183--.
The Faubourg St. Germain took her up. Viscount Bagwig, our excellent
ambassador, paid her marked attention. The princes of the family
frequented her salons. The most rigid and noted of the English ladies
resident in the French capital acknowledged and countenanced her; the
virtuous Lady Elderbury, the severe Lady Rockminster, the venerable
Countess of Southdown--people, in a word, renowned for austerity, and of
quite a dazzling moral purity:--so great and beneficent an influence had
the possession of ten (some said twenty) thousand a year exercised
upon Lady Clavering's character and reputation. And her munificence
and good-will were unbounded. Anybody (in society) who had a scheme of
charity was sure to find her purse open. The French ladies of piety got
money from her to support their schools and convents; she subscribed
indifferently for the Armenian patriarch; for Father Barbarossa, who
came to Europe to collect funds for his monastery on Mount Athos;
for the Baptist Mission to Quashyboo, and the Orthodox Settlement in
Feefawfoo, the largest and most savage of the Cannibal Islands. And it
is on record of her, that, on the same day on which Madame de Cricri got
five Napoleons from her in support of the poor persecuted Jesuits, who
were at that time in very bad odour in France, Lady Budelight put her
down in her subscription-list for the Rev. J. Ramshorn, who had had
a vision which ordered him to convert the Pope of Rome. And more than
this, and for the benefit of the worldly, her ladyship gave the best
dinners, and the grandest balls and suppers, which were known at Paris
during that season.

And it was during this time, that the good-natured lady must have
arranged matters with her husband's creditors in England, for Sir
Francis reappeared in his native country, without fear of arrest; was
announced in the Morning Post, and the county paper, as having taken up
his residence at Mivart's Hotel; and one day the anxious old housekeeper
at Clavering House beheld a carriage and four horses drive up the
long avenue, and stop before the moss-grown steps in front of the vast
melancholy portico.

Three gentlemen were in the carriage--an open one. On the back seat was
our old acquaintance, Mr. Tatham of Chatteris, whilst in the places of
honour sate a handsome and portly gentleman enveloped in mustachios,
whiskers, fur collars, and braiding, and by him a pale languid man who
descend