The company assembled; and such as have experienced the up-hill work of conversation at a country dinner, when the subjects of weather, crops, the moon, and the roads are _pumped dry_, will easily believe, that if Miss Ferret were not the most polished woman in the world, her animation rendered her, notwithstanding, the most agreeable ingredient upon many occasions, in those assemblies which her presence enlivened. She had the art to shake a drawing-room together, if we may use such a simile; and wherever she was she contrived to prevent that _stratification_ of men and women which madame de Staël has so happily described, as characteristic of an English provincial half hour before dinner. Miss Ferret had seen the _last_ newspaper, or talked with "an intelligent man who had stepped from the coach" in the precise moment of her setting out; or she had heard a paragraph read from a London letter; or had a conference with the post-master immediately before she quitted home; in short she knew something either true or false, which no one else happened to know, of every thing and every body. Thin and active, she glided about the room, and brought people into actual contact who had never interchanged a look till she appeared. Like the grouting of a wall she compacted and cemented what was nothing but a heap of loose disjointed stones, till her vivacious tongue poured in its eloquence amongst them. When the glad announcement was sounded, that dinner was served, Miss Ferret, who had laid her plan of operations, commenced them by keeping up such a cross fire of talk, while the company were in the act of descending the stairs, that by the time they reached the dining-parlour, she now marshalled the guests without being perceived by any one, and contrived to slide herself into a chair between Miss Robinson and Mr. Hartland. The more obvious arrangement which, by placing the gentleman in the centre, would have given both ladies an equal claim on his attention, might not have been so judicious; but by Miss Ferret's disposition of affairs, she constituted herself the "soft intermediate" through whom any intercourse held by the extremes must pass; and she was thus enabled to regulate and guide it as was most conducive to her ultimate ends. Before the dessert came upon the table she had ventured to insinuate that there was a wonderful sympathy in the tastes of her _protegés__protegés_; and as she conveyed their sentiments from one to the other upon the comparative merits of roast and boiled, fricassee and fry, hot and cold, town and country, with sundry other interesting opposites which she herself suggested, there certainly did appear to be a harmony of opinion which bid fair for domestic union in that state of life which, we are taught to believe, traces much of the unhappiness by which it is, alas! so frequently embittered, to a fatal talent for disputation upon such like topics of daily recurrence.