she as suddenly recollected that she liked the new dish a
great deal better than the one that had failed. Even the
weather received at her hands very different treatment from
that which it is accustomed to meet with. A black frost she
considered wholesome and bracing; a cutting east wind, she
described as a fresh breeze; snow, rain, and hail, had each
particular merits, in her eyes. When the sun shone, it was
fortunate; when it rained, it was a piece of luck, for she had
ever so many letters to write; and there was nothing like a
rainy day for getting through business. And if the weather was
without any other apology, "Still," as I heard her once say,
"it was better than no weather at all."
I never heard her admit that anything was a grievance; that
anybody was tiresome. Her friends' misfortunes, indeed, she
felt heartily sorry for; but, with respect to them, she found
consolation in the fact, that, in proportion to their extent,
she could bestow a fuller share of sympathy, a more ample
measure of kindness than ever, out of the ever-springing
sources of tenderness, with which her own heart overflowed.
Poor Mrs. Hatton! she was the best of women, but not the
wisest of governesses. During the years that she superintended
my education, she had never been able to disagree with me, as
to grammar and arithmetic being dull and perfectly useless
studies; or help agreeing with me that Sir Walter Scott's
novels improved the mind infinitely more than Goldsmith's
History of England; and so I read novels to her, and she
listened with delighted attention--I wrote poetry, which she
read aloud, and declared was the best that had ever been
written--I put aside all the books that bored me, all the
exercises that puzzled me, and she heartily concurred with me,
in pronouncing them all highly unprofitable and superfluous.
Dear Mrs. Hatton! she was not wise; but such guileless,
warm-hearted lack of wisdom as hers, often supplied the place
of those mental qualifications which are too seldom united to
a perfect singleness of heart and simplicity of character.
She was, indeed, a capital travelling companion; as we passed
the gates of Elmsley I said to her, "Do you know, dear Mrs.
Hatton, that I am apt to be very silent in a carriage; shall
you mind it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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