“What a sunset! How golden! how beautiful!” she exclaims. “The sun just disappearing, and the narrow liny clouds, which a few minutes ago lay like soft vapoury streaks along the horizon, lighted up with a golden splendour that the eye can scarcely endure.... Another minute and the brilliant orb totally disappears, and the sky above grows every moment more varied and more beautiful as the dazzling golden lines are mixed with glowing red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark specks and mingled with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-sparrow. To look up at that glorious sky, and then to see that magnificent picture reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon water is a pleasure never to be described and never forgotten. My heart swells and my eyes fill as I write of it and think of the immeasurable majesty of nature and the unspeakable goodness of God who has spread an enjoyment so pure, so peaceful and so intense before the meanest and the lowest of His creatures.” [Illustration] CHAPTER XXII A LOQUACIOUS VISITOR There is an amusing sketch in the first volume of _Our Village_ entitled “The Talking Lady,” from which we should like to quote a few passages. Its scene is evidently laid in the Mitfords’ common sitting-room, whose two windows look both front and back, and in which we have sat many a time. After alluding to a play written by Ben Jonson called _The Silent Woman_ Miss Mitford remarks:— “If the learned dramatist had happened to fall in with such a specimen of female loquacity as I have just parted with, he might perhaps have given us a pendant to his picture in the _Talking Lady_. Pity but he had! He would have done her justice, which I could not at any time, least of all now. I am too much stunned; too much like one escaped from a belfry on a coronation day. I am just resting from the fatigue of four days’ hard listening—four snowy, sleety, rainy days, all of them too bad to admit the possibility that any petticoated thing, were she as hardy as a Scotch fir, should stir out; four days chained by ‘sad civility’ to that fireside once so quiet, and again—cheering thought!—again I trust to be so, when the echo of that visitor’s incessant tongue shall have died away.