“Is His Lordship not yet in sight, My Lady?” asks this one.
“Nay! that is not he, Chockey, and whisk me! but when His Lordship does come, he’ll find a very sorry entertainment. I swear, as dad says, I’ll not see him when he does appear, that will not I. Nay, shake not your head, girl. Is’t not true that Lady Peggy had once a lover?”
“’Twere truer say a dozen of that sort of gentry, Madam,” replies the buxom Chockey, as she sorts the plums, the best in her bonnet, the flaws over the wall where the chickens and hens cackle to the refuse.
“Well, well, twenty if you like! but one more favored than the rest? the properest sort of man at saddle, gun, line, wrestle, toast, song, or dance? honest, straightforward, beautiful, as dad says the angels are he saw painted on the walls at Rome. Speak I truth, eh, Chockey?”
“Madam, that you do.”
“And this paragon so worshiped his Peggy as, when she went off a-three months since to visit her godmother in Kent, he vowed by all the saints in the calendar he’d scarce survive until her return. False or true, eh, Chockey?”
My Lady Peggy punctuated this query by an accurate aim and hit, on the top of her waiting woman’s head, with an especially large plum.
“True, Madam,” dodging the fruit, and still with an eye on the road.
“And then, back comes My Lady Peggy, cutting short her stay in Kent, where she had much pleasure, to tell the truth, in the society of a very fine young nobleman.”
“Lawk, Madam! another?” interrupted the faithful Chockey.