y of wine. They have just begun to drink '24
claret now, that of '15 being scarce, and almost drunk up. Writes daily,
and hears every morning from Mrs. Bagshot; does not read her letters
always: does not rise till long past eleven o'clock of a Sunday, and has
John Bull and Bell's Life, in bed: frequents the Blue Posts sometimes;
rides a stout cob out of his county, and pays like the Bank of England.

The house is a Norfolk house. Mrs. Ridley was housekeeper to the great
Squire Bayham, who had the estate before the Conqueror, and who came to
such a dreadful crash in the year 1825, the year of the panic. Bayhams
still belongs to the family, but in what a state, as those can say who
recollect it in its palmy days! Fifteen hundred acres of the best
land in England were sold off: all the timber cut down as level as a
billiard-board. Mr. Bayham now lives up in one corner of the house,
which used to be filled with the finest company in Europe. Law bless
you! the Bayhams have seen almost all the nobility of England come in
and go out, and were gentlefolks when many a fine lord's father of the
present day was sweeping a counting-house.

The house will hold genteelly no more than these two inmates; but in the
season it manages to accommodate Miss Cann, who too was from Bayhams,
having been a governess there to the young lady who is dead, and who now
makes such a livelihood as she can best raise, by going out as a daily
teacher. Miss Cann dines with Mrs. Ridley in the adjoining little
back-parlour. Ridley but seldom can be spared to partake of the
family dinner, his duties in the house and about the person of my Lord
Todmorden keeping him constantly near that nobleman. How little Miss
Cann can go on and keep alive on the crumb she eats for breakfast, and
the scrap she picks at dinner, du astonish Mrs. Ridley, that it du! She
declares that the two canary-birds encaged in her window (whence is a
cheerful prospect of the back of Lady Whittlesea's Chapel) eat more than
Miss Cann. The two birds set up a tremendous singing and chorussing
when Miss Cann, spying the occasion of the first-floor lodger's
absence, begins practising her music-pieces. Such trills, roulades, and
flourishes go on from the birds and the lodger! it is a wonder how any
fingers can move over the jingling ivory so quickly as Miss Cann's.
Excellent a woman as she is, admirably virtuous, frugal, brisk, honest,
and cheerful, I would not like to live in lodgings where th