yes and red-brown cheeks! May you have spoken true!...

Meantime, my companions, my father and Mr. Kean, were discussing
the fortunes of Poland. If I were a man, with a hundred thousand
pounds at my disposal, I would raise a regiment and join the Poles.
The Russians have been beaten again, which is good hearing. Is it
possible this cause should fall to the earth? On our way home, had
a nice smooth, long canter by the river-side. We turned off our
road to visit a pretty property of Mr. F----'s, the house half-way
up a hill, prettily seated among pleasant woods. We galloped up
some fields above it to the brow of the rise, and had three
mouthfuls of delicious fresh breeze, and a magnificent view of
Exeter and the surrounding country.... After dinner, off to the
theater; it was my benefit, "The Gamester." The house was very
full, and I played and looked well; but what a Stukely! I was
afraid my eyes would scarcely answer my purpose, but that I should
have been obliged to "employer l'effort de mon bras" to keep him at
a proper distance. What ruffianly wooing! and not one of the actors
knew their parts. Stukely said to me in his love-speech, "Time has
not gathered the roses from your cheeks, though often washed them."
I had heard of Time as the thinner of people's hair, but never as
the washer of their faces.

_Sunday, July 31st._--Went to church, to St. Sidwell's.... We had
another good sermon; that preacher must be a good man, and I should
like to know him....

Our dinner-party this evening was like nothing but a chapter out of
one of Miss Austen's novels. What wonderful books those are! She
must have written down the very conversations she heard _verbatim_,
to have made them so like, which is Irish.... How many things one
ought to die of and doesn't! That dinner did come to an end. In the
drawing-room afterward, in spite of the dreadful heat, two fair
female friends actually divided one chair between them; I expected
to see them run into one every minute, and kept speculating then
which they would be, till the idea fascinated me like a thing in a
nightmare. As we were taking our departure, and had got half way
down the stairs, a general rush was made at us, and an attempt,
upon some pretext, to get us back into that dreadful drawing-room.
I tho