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Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations tet, extending beyond the period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable fort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash kings offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habit -- yet so, as "with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather uood, than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and plaihat I was altered. We are both great readers in different dires. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange poraries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our on reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teazes me. I have little in the progress of events. She must have a story -- well, ill<big></big>, or indifferently told -- so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil acts. The fluctuations of fortune in fi -- and almost in real life -- have ceased to i, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinion -- heads with some diverting twist in them -- the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre Nothing goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of on sympathy. She "holds Nature more clever." I pardon her blio the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, toug the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last tury but one -- the thrioble, chaste, and virtuous, -- but again somewhat fantastical, and inal-braind, generous Margaret Newcastle.It has bee of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, free-thinkers leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she her wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her uanding.
We are both of us ined to be a little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this --- that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points; upon something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of vi, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking.
I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, fet does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in pany: at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully uanding its purport -- which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presenind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she speak to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the sce, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. Her education in youth was not much atteo; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of aplishments. She was tumbled early, by act or <bdo></bdo>design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much sele or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their wedlock might not be diminished by it; but I answer for it, that it makes (if the worst e to the worst) most inparable old maids.
In a season of distress, she is the truest forter; but ieazing acts, and minor perplexities, which do not<cite>9９lib?</cite> call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfa. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit; but best, when she goes a journey with you.
We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to heat up the quarters of some of our less-knowions in that fine try.
The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farmhouse, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I just remember havihere, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, uhe care et; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joiehat we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmothers sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the ty, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed sihe visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who or what sort of persons ied Mackery End -- kindred or strange folk -- we were afraid almost to jecture, but determined some way to explore.
By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recolle, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. For though I had fotten it, we had never fotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I khe aspect of a place, which, whe, O how u was to that, which I had jured up so many times instead of it!
Still the air breathed balmily about it; the season was in the "heart of June," and I could say with the poet,
But thou, that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation !
Bridgets was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her old acquaintance again -- some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the se soon re-firmed itself in her affe -- and she traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds were alike flown) -- with a breathless impatience nition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years.
The only thi was to get into the house -- and that was a difficulty whie singly would have been insurmountable; for I am terribly shy in making myself known ters and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, strohan scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soourned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Wele. It was the you of the Gladmans; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had beistress of the old mansion. A ely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the ty. But this adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all -- more ely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget pointe藏书网d out to her, climbing a style. But the name kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those sleies, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, iy, homely, lovifordshire. In five minutes we were as thhly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up together; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Christian names. So Christians should call one ao have seen Bridget, and her -- it was like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins! There was a grad dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmers wife, which would have shined in a palace -- or so we thought it. We were made wele by husband and wife equally -- we, and our friend that was with us -- I had almost fotten him -- but B. F. will not so soon fet that meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the far distant shores where the Kangaroo haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in anticipation of our ing; and, after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me fet with what ho pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing. -- With what corresponding kindness we were received by them also -- hets memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recolles of things and persons, to my utter astonishment, and her own -- and to the astou of B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin there, -- old effaced images of more than half-fotten e>9９lib?</cite>s and circumstaill crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon e out upon exposure to a friendly warmth, -- when I fet all this, then may my try cousins fet me; and Bridget no more remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge -- as I have been her care in foolish manhood since -- in those pretty pastoral walks, long ago about Mackery End, ifordshire.
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