Well, this fair stranger is Miss Elizabeth Drury. You would like to know more? Then, I can tell you—that the Heritages lately met with her at Scarborough—where, by-the-bye, the Degges are yet—that is the reason you don’t see them here. Miss Elizabeth Drury is of Yorkshire. Her father is as eminent an agriculturist as Mr. William Fairfax is a grocer. Mr. Trant Drury is a great authority in all agricultural matters, an advanced man in Georgic science, in knowledge of stock, implements, and manures. He is a gentleman by education and capital, but not by land: and Miss Drury is his only child. I say, and I am sure George Woodburn thinks her, a very interesting person. He is delighted to see how, after a few desultory and fragmentary interchanges of speech with longish pauses between them, his sister Ann and she warm-up and “cotton” to each other. What? Yes; they are got upon love of the country, and of the—Church. Oh, that is enough—the Church and the country, and George Herbert’s poetry, and Jeremy Taylor—an odd mixture, but very taking to both Ann Woodburn and Elizabeth Drury. There is a great league struck up at once—a friendship for life. Ann Woodburn does not perceive that Dr. Leroy, at her right hand, is spending all his conversation on Millicent Heritage; and Miss Drury, though her eyes do wander a little over the strange company, is deeply interested in Ann.
“But pray,” she asks of Ann, “who is that very agreeable young man to the left across the table, who seems to look one through and through.”
“Ah! that is my dear brother George!” says Ann. “You will like him so when you know him.”
Miss Drury blushed. Why should she? It must have been because she saw that George Woodburn had noticed the looks of herself and sister Ann directed towards him.
Down the table that amiable-looking Ephraim Wire is deeply indoctrinating a listening number with Phonetics, Vegetarianism, and the true source of health—all topics totally unknown then except to himself. Further down we hear the voice of William Fairfax, grown earnest and rather loud. He is evidently commenting on the burdens of the poor, and the diseases of the body politic: and is uttering his favourite declaration:
“We have three standing armies.”
“Three!” says some one.
“We maintain three standing armies,” he continues. “We have a standing army of soldiers to fight the French; and another standing army of doctors to fight Death; and another standing army of parsons to fight the Devil, of whom he standeth not in awe!”
“Hear! hear!” Much laughter resounded from that quarter.
“I hear our friend Fairfax,” said Mr. Thomas Clavering, “on his favourite topic. He is brushing our cloth for us; but the good, dear old reviler, he would give us a whole wardrobe if we wanted one. For my part, I like to hear his good-humoured diatribes, and often look in on him, and am sure to find some of the classes he denounces, bankers, officers, doctors, or clergymen there. There is more originality in that man’s mode of viewing things than in all the minds in the county. But mark me, I will take my revenge on him before he goes.”