Miss Pratt having kept her brother’s house during his long widowhood, his daughter, Miss Eliza, had had the advantage of being educated by her aunt, and thus of imbibing a very strong antipathy to all that remarkable woman’s tastes and opinions. The silent handsome girl of two-and-twenty, who is covering the ‘Memoirs of Felix Neff,’ is Miss Eliza Pratt; and the small elderly lady in dowdy clothing, who is also working diligently, is Mrs. Pettifer, a superior-minded widow, much valued in Milby, being such a very respectable person to have in the house in case of illness, and of quite too good a family to receive any money-payment--you could always send her garden-stuff that would make her ample amends. Miss Pratt has enough to do in commenting on the heap of volumes before her, feeling it a responsibility entailed on her by her great powers of mind to leave nothing without the advantage of her opinion. Whatever was good must be sprinkled with the chrism of her approval; whatever was evil must be blighted by her condemnation. ‘Upon my word,’ she said, in a deliberate high voice, as if she were dictating to an amanuensis, ‘it is a most admirable selection of works for popular reading, this that our excellent Mr. Tryan has made. I do not know whether, if the task had been confided to me, I could have made a selection, combining in a higher degree religious instruction and edification with a due admixture of the purer species of amusement. This story of ‘Father Clement’ is a library in itself on the errors of Romanism. I have ever considered fiction a suitable form for conveying moral and religious instruction, as I have shown in my little work ‘De Courcy,’ which, as a very clever writer in the Crompton ‘Argus’ said at the time of its appearance, is the light vehicle of a weighty moral.’ ‘One ’ud think,’ said Mrs. Linnet, who also had her spectacles on, but chiefly for the purpose of seeing what the others were doing, ‘there didn’t want much to drive people away from a religion as makes ’em walk barefoot over stone floors, like that girl in Father Clement--sending the blood up to the head frightful. Anybody might see that was an unnat’ral creed.’