“Read hard all the afternoon: dined on an elderly fowl flavoured with Dutch oven--a bird that must have known Coltonslough when the first bow-windowed house was a damp brickwork skeleton, grim and open to the howling of the winds. Read for some time after dinner, and let my fire out. Went downstairs to hunt up matches and firewood, and found my landlady and Susan sitting opposite to each other at a little table with one tallow-candle, reading pious compositions of an evangelical tendency. They both seemed glad to see me; so I stopped and talked to them. Susan had read the ‘Prisoner of Chillon;’ she read it last night, and cried over it ‘fearful,’ my landlady informed me; so we were able to talk about the poem, and I read two or three of the fugitive pieces aloud. I used to be rather great at the debating-club at O., and I gave them the ‘Thyrzas’ and ‘Day of my Destinys’ very strong. I could see the tears shining in Susan’s eyes before I’d finished. I used to recite poetry to Rosa sometimes, when I’d been taking too much Bass, and we stood in the moonlit porch at the King’s Arms, with the river, and the willows, and the towing-path all of a shimmer in the silvery light; but one is apt to get tired of reciting sentimental poetry to a young person who cries, ‘Lor’, how funny!’ at the close of some passionate verse. I remember thundering out that grand anathema of Tom Moore’s against the Prince Regent, ‘Go, deceiver, go!’ and my Rosa asked me naïvely what the gentleman had done that the other gentleman should use such bad language to him. No, Rosa, your strong point was not intellect. In the matter of sticky curls and large black eyes you are unsurpassed, but the sentimental element in your nature may be represented by zero.