I said wilfully, wickedly,—may be, lest Miss Emery's long tongue should carry back to London what was by implication not true—that we did not even know where Treherne Court was, and that we had only met Captain Treherne accidentally among the camp-officers who visited at the Cedars.
Lis pinched me: Penelope looked annoyed. Was it a highly virtuous act thus to have vexed both my sisters? Alack! I feel myself growing more unamiable every day. What will be the end of it?
“First come, first served,” must have been Lisabel's motto for the evening, since, Captain Treherne re-appearing, scarlet beat plain black clear out of the field. I was again obliged to follow, as Charity, pouring the oil and wine of my agreeable conversation into the wounds made by my sister's bright eyes, and receiving as gratitude such an amount of information on turnips, moor-lands, and the true art of sheep-feeding, as will make me look with respect and hesitation on every leg of mutton that comes to our table for the next six months.
“O, Colin, dear Colin, my Colin, my dear,
Who wont the wild mountains to trace without fear,
O, where are thy flocks that so swiftly rebound,
And fly o'er the heath without touching the ground.”
A remarkable fact in natural history, which much impressed me in my childhood. What is the rest?
“Where the birch-tree hangs weeping o'er fountain so
clear,