Oh, what a redeeming virtue there is in a large swimming dark eye--black, if you please, for _choice_--hazle, if black cannot be had, for _effect_; but for _love!_ heavens, and all the heathen gods and goddesses, give me the deep deep ethereal blue--such blue, so darkly pure, as you might cut out of the noon-day sky within the tropics, about a pistol-shot from the gaudy sun, which must be at the moment eclipsed by a stray cloud, had up from the depths of old ocean expressly for the nonce. One can look into the very soul of _such_ a woman with _such_ an eye;--ay, and tell whether or no your own beautiful miniature be painted on the retina of her heart--that's a bull, I conceive, but my mother's Kilkenny blood will peep forth in despite, now and then; but your dark fine-flashing black sparklers--oh, _Diable!_ they look into _you_, my fine fellow, instead of your spying into _them_, which is sometimes mighty _inconvenient_; and then the humbug of the "eye of the gazelle!" His lordship's gazelle blinker, so soft and yielding, and all the rest of it!--poo, I would rather that my wife, Mrs Benjie Brail, _when I get her_, had a glass eye; a regular pair of prisms from old Dolland's in St Paul's Churchyard, than the gazelle eye of his lordship's favourites--such an eye would not long have _glowered_ out of the head of an honest woman, take my word for it. Where have I got to? where the deuce left I off? Oh--the beautiful eyes of the fair person, whose sweet voice had startled me. Her hair, dark and shining, was shaded off her forehead Madona-like; and she wore a most becoming, but very plain white muslin cap, with two little lace straps, that hung down loose on each side of her face, like the scale defences attached to the helmets of the French _grenadiers à cheval_. Heaven help me with my similes, a beautiful demure woman, and a horse grenadier! She was dressed in a plain black silk gown, over which she wore a neatly embroidered white apron; but from the ostentatious puffing out of the white cambric handkerchief that she held in her fair clasped hands, with their blue meandering veins, I perceived, if she were the mother of the beautiful boy--and here the murder of my description is out at last--that a second edition of him was printed off, and nearly ready for publication. But the figure that sat next her instantly riveted my attention. She was a tall sylph-like girl of nineteen or thereabouts, with laughing features, not so perfect as the elder female's, to whom she bore a striking resemblance, and long flowing ringlets, that wandered all over her snow-white neck and bosom, disdaining even the control of a ribbon or band of any kind. She was dressed in some grey homespun looking stuff, but neither of the ladies wore any, the smallest ornament whatever. "Is that your child, madam?" said I, to the eldest female. It was--and the patriarchal old man, with true natural good breeding, at once broke the ice.