"And yet they would be reckoned silly and vulgar, to speak half as long about a new combination of color in a ribbon, which is in my estimation quite as interesting! If all those who detest the country, had courage to confess it, as I do, how the shades of rural life would be deserted, and volumes of rural poetry cast into the fire! I am not one to 'hang a thought on ev'ry thorn,' and indeed my thoughts have thorns enough already!"
"There is too much still water at Studley, and the grounds are altogether too artificial for my taste," said Marion. "Those little ponds, like globes for gold-fish, are dull and uninteresting."
"They resemble china bowls, and should be filled with iced punch!" observed Sir Patrick. "Anything so like the basin of the Serpentine reminds me of old women committing suicide! This is not a good sporting country, so crowded with laurels, temples, statues, cascades, and that sort of trash! I wish we had all staid at home, and looked over Turner's views of Studley, for they are beautifully done!"
"Yes!" said Agnes, yawning, "I like the works of art better than nature, pictures, statues, books, or pianofortes; and" added she, with a withering look at Captain De Crespigny, "I like human nature least of all."
"What has set you off Childe-Haroldizing this morning, Agnes?" asked Sir Patrick, with angry surprise. "Strike me poetical, but I like Marion's style of admiring, exclaiming, and wondering the best, for it is not either overdone or underdone!"
"You shall have a most intelligent guide, Sir, immediately," said the superintendent of the lodge, civilly touching his hat to Sir Patrick.
"Let him be deaf and dumb, if you have any compassion for me. It is trouble enough to come here, without listening to an endless rigmarole about ancient abbots, clustered pillars, and stone coffins. The fellow will not abate a single tomb or tree! I could invent a story quite as good as his, and equally true! 'built nobody knows when, and destroyed nobody knows how.'"
"I like to hear all, and believe all," said Marion; "but you remind me, Patrick, of the French lady, who said she wished to be taught everything in two words. Now let us summon up any little poetry that may be lurking in our composition, to admire those noble, pillar-like elms, with branches so thickly clustered that the wind can scarcely elbow its way through the leaves. Those shadows are magnificent, flickering across the road."
"Give me an old post-horse instead of an old tree, and I shall call up much finer associations!" said Sir Patrick. "My sole idea of enjoying the country is connected with hunting, shooting, and fishing; but as to living for ruins, flowers, green trees, fat cows, rocky mountains, and all that sort of trash, excuse me. They do for poets and painters, professionally, to rave about, but I care no more to look at that prodigiously aged tree before me, than at old Lord Doncaster, tottering behind us with Agnes."
"That tree, Sir, is a Spanish chesnut, 112 feet high, and 22 feet in girth," said the guide, in his usual business-like tone. "It has seen a hundred summers."