gaieties of the capital at its gayest possible time. It was a severe trial for Sandboys to withstand the united batteries of Jopson’s enthusiastic advocacy, his daughter’s entreaties, his son’s assurances of steadiness. But Sandboys, though naturally possessed of a heart of butter, delighted to assure himself that he carried about a flint in his bosom; so he told Jopson, with a shake of his head, that he might as well try to move Helvellyn or shake Skiddaw; and that, while he blushed for the weakness of his family, he thanked Heaven that he, at least, was adamant. Jopson showed him by the list he brought with him that the whole of the villagers were going, and that Hassness would be left neighbourless for a circuit of seven miles at least; whereupon Sandboys observed with a chuckle, that the place could not be much more quiet than it was, and that with those fine fellows, Robinson and Davy Top, and Dod and Honister around him, he should never want company. Jopson talked sagely of youths seeing the world and expanding their minds by travel; whereat the eyes of the younger Sandboys glistened; but the father rejoined, that travel was of use only for the natural beauties of the scenery it revealed, and the virtues of the people with whom it brought the traveller into association; “and where,” he asked, with evident pride of county, “could more natural beauty or greater native virtue be found, than amongst the mountains and the pastoral race of Buttermere?” Seizing the latest _Times_ that had reached him the evening before, he pointed triumphantly to some paragraph, headed “Ingenious Fraud on a Yokel!” wherein a country gentleman had been cleverly duped of some hundreds of pounds paid to him that morning at Smithfield; and he asked with sarcasm, whether those were the scenes and those the people that Jopson thought he could improve his son Jobby by introducing him to?