“Bless me!” said Mrs. Grace, when she found the feathers, which she had placed with so much skill in her mistress’s hair, lying upon the table half an hour afterward—“why, I thought my mistress was going out!”
Grace’s surprise deprived her even of the power of exclamation, when she learned that her mistress stayed at home to sup with Master Herbert upon radishes. At night she listened with malignant curiosity, as she sat at work in her mistress’s dressing-room, to the frequent bursts of laughter, and to the happy little voices of the festive company who were at supper in an adjoining apartment.
“This will never do!” thought Grace; but presently the laughter ceased, and listening attentively, she heard the voice of one of the young ladies reading. “Oh ho!” thought Grace, “if it comes to reading, Master Herbert will soon be asleep.”—But though it had come to reading, Herbert was, at this instant, broad awake.
At supper, when the radishes were distributed, Favoretta was very impatient to taste them; the first which she tasted was hot, she said, and she did not quite like it.
“Hot!” cried Herbert, who criticized her language, in return for her criticism upon his radishes, “I don’t think you can call a radish hot—it is cold, I think: I know what is meant by tasting sweet, or sour, or bitter.”
“Well,” interrupted Favoretta, “what is the name for the taste of this radish which bites my tongue?”
“Pungent,” said Isabella, and she eagerly produced a quotation in support of her epithet—
“‘And pungent radish biting infant’s tongue.’”
“I know for once,” said Matilda, smiling, “where you met with that line, I believe: is it not in Shenstone’s Schoolmistress, in the description of the old woman’s neat little garden?”
“Oh! I should like to hear about that old woman’s neat little garden,” cried Herbert.