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He must advance, hat in hand, and ask to be taken in as a favour, as many a stiff-necked wanderer, accustomed to the obsequious attentions of "mine host," has learnt to his cost. There is no such dreadful autocrat as your half-and-half innkeeper in South Africa, and then he is so completely master of the situation.

Besides the squirrels which are constantly there, we see jays, wood-pigeons, jackdaws, rooks, and flocks of the smaller birds; if snow should prevail, a whole rookery will come to see what is to be had. By constantly watching their movements I have learnt that the squirrel's tail has quite a language of its own.

"It is a horrid boat," she said; "I don't want to look at it." "You're quite right, little miss," said old Edward, touching his cap. "It ain't safe, and somebody will be drowned out of it one of these days. I wish it had gone to the bottom, I do; but Miss Beatrice, she is that foolhardy there ain't no doing nothing with her." "I fancy that she has learnt a lesson," said Geoffrey.

"Thou hast in truth learnt oratory, most sapient daughter," he said, bitterly; "thou pleadest well and flowingly, yet thou hast said not for whom thou bearest this marvellous interest it can scarce be for a traitor? Methinks the enemies of Edward should be even such unto his children."

I do not know whether Lady Diana viewed them as bad companions for her son, or her son as a bad companion for them; but she was very severe about it, and when I thought of the hunt dinner at Foling, my heart sank, even while I was indignant at any notion of distrusting Harold; and it did indeed seem to me that he had learnt where to look for strength and self-command, and that he had a real hatred and contempt of evil.

He told her that by this time she must have learnt her lesson, that it was useless to pretend that she had not, that Rupert Louth's marriage had taught her all that she needed to know, and that now she must realize that the time for adventures, for romance, for the secret indulgence of the passions, was in her case irrevocably over. "Fifty! Fifty! Fifty!" he knelled in her ears.

Madame Babette returned home, grave, depressed, silent, and loaded with the best coffee. Some time afterwards he learnt why his cousin had sought for this interview. It was to extract from her, by promises and threats, the real name of Mam'selle Cannes, which would give him a clue to the true appellation of The Faithful Cousin.

He learnt that this lady had recently married a person of her own rank, to whom she professed to be violently attached; that they lived together with great tranquillity, and had the reputation of conducting themselves as persons of extreme propriety and regularity; paid their debts, and avoided, by their air of neatness, order, and modest reserve, the scandal of even their most ill-natured neighbors.

"Would you like to walk upstairs, sir?" asked she, in a trembling voice, for she had learnt who the visitor was from the driver of the fly, who had run up to the house to inquire what was detaining the gentleman that he had brought from the Queen's Hotel; and, knowing that Ruth had caught the fatal fever from her attendance on Mr Donne, Sally imagined that it was but a piece of sad civility to invite him upstairs to see the poor dead body, which she had laid out and decked for the grave, with such fond care that she had grown strangely proud of its marble beauty.

She would proceed to her task with all seriousness; but sometimes chose the most ridiculous, as well as irreverent passages, from songs, and other things, which she had before somewhere learnt, which would set us, who understood her, laughing. One of her rhymes, I recollect, began with: "The Lord of love, look from above, Upon this turkey hen."