coolness in the world, go off lamenting the degraded state of the robbers of the present day, saying that they were not half the fine set of people that they used to be in “the good old times and days of yore;” and then she’d actually have the impudence to look me in the face, and ask me if I knew anything about the great Jack Sheppard, declaring that he was the robber for her money, for he never shed blood but once; and whatever his faults might have been, the book that had been written upon him said very beautifully that he never told a lie. This was the secret of it all. Of course, with the high-flown notions she had got of robbers, and brigands, and pirates, and a pack of other pickpockets, out of her weekly pennyworths of romantic rodomontades; and believing that the vagabonds possessed every virtue under the sun, with merely the slight drawback of occasionally wanting either your money or your life, she was a common victim to every villain that chose to impose upon her. I declare she got me into one scrape by her credulity that nearly proved the death of me, (though it wasn’t the one that I spoke of last month, and for which I sent her away.) You see, summer was just coming on, and the fine weather had set in; so I went to work, looking up my light dresses; and it’s very lucky I did so, for there was scarcely any of them that were fit to put on. They were all as yellow as marigolds; so I packed them off to the wash, every one excepting a very nice clear muslin, which really was so slightly discoloured, that it seemed to me worse than a sin to go giving a matter of eightpence to have it washed, when with a nice dark shawl it would look nearly clean, and do very well for a walk round the park some fine day at the end of the week. When I saw my beautiful Swiss cambric again, with its sweet pretty little, bright-red flower upon it, and its rich skirt and four rows of deep flounces, I couldn’t for the life of me help saying to myself, “Oh, you are a perfect love, I declare! and when you’re nicely clear-starched you’ll look superb, with my pink drawn silk bonnet and green shot-silk scarf, next Sunday at church.” And the more I looked at it, the more it struck me that I might just as well coax my own dear Edward, the first evening he was in one of his merry humours, to consent to have a one-horse fly for half the day; and then after church we could go round and make a number of calls that I was positively dying to rub off, and afterwards take a drive round Hyde Park, and wind up with a promenade in Kensington Gardens. Nothing on earth would have given me greater pleasure than to have taken my darling good mother with me, as I knew it would do her so much good; but then she always _will_ dress so funny, and I felt convinced that, as matters stood, it would not be safe to trust the dear old soul with Edward a whole afternoon in a shut-up fly, or they would be certain to get to high words again, and then I should never forgive myself.