“And yet Miss Merlin fell in love with Cornet Brown. Where they met, has always been to me a mystery; and when they did meet, I cannot conceive what they found to talk about, for they had not two ideas in common. He did not even read; for, with all his quiet habits, the Cornet was as ignorant upon most topics of general information, as if he had been the fastest and idlest of his kind. His sole passion was music, and Miss Merlin did not know a note. Nevertheless, she fell in love with him—over head—such a fall as she never had in her life before, even in the Vale. She gave up hunting; she parted with her horses; she altered her whole habits and disposition and appearance, as a woman will, to identify herself the more with the man she loves. A good many of us in that part of the country had entered for the race; but we saw it was all up now—Brown in a canter, and the rest nowhere. “The Cornet, too, seemed fond of her, in his own undemonstrative way. When not practising the pianoforte in his barrack-room, he was generally to be found at the Rectory; and as he never interfered with old Merlin, who indeed hardly knew him by sight, he would have suited him as well for a son-in-law as anybody else. The thing seemed to go on swimmingly, his brother-officers laughed at him, and we all thought the Cornet and Fanny Merlin were engaged. “But this deserving young officer had an elder brother, whose views in some peculiar points it did by no means suit that his junior should commit matrimony, and the elder Brown appeared ere long upon the scene of action. He came down to stay at the barracks, where he made himself so agreeable to the Hussars, that they seriously proposed to him that he should make interest at the Horse Guards for the transfer of his brother’s commission to himself. He didn’t know a note of music—the elder Brown; but he talked, and he drank, and he smoked, and he rode, and, in short, was as jolly a fellow as ever kept a mess-table in a roar. Also, he made a slight acquaintance with Miss Merlin—not, I am bound to state, with any ulterior views; for he had a wife and promising little family of his own. He was a man of energy, you see—this gentleman—and when he meant a thing, why he went and did it without delay.