The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable FamilyThackeray, William Makepeace
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The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Domestic fiction; Families -- England -- Fiction
The house will hold genteelly no more than these two inmates; but in
the season it manages to accommodate Miss Cann, who too was from
Bayhams, having been a governess there to the young lady who is dead,
and who now makes such a livelihood as she can best raise, by going out
as a daily teacher. Miss Cann dines with Mrs. Ridley in the adjoining
little back-parlour. Ridley but seldom can be spared to partake of the
family dinner, his duties in the house and about the person of my Lord
Todmorden keeping him constantly near that nobleman. How little Miss
Cann can go on and keep alive on the crumb she eats for breakfast, and
the scrap she picks at dinner, du astonish Mrs. Ridley, that it _du!_
She declares that the two canary-birds encaged in her window (whence is
a cheerful prospect of the back of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel) eat more
than Miss Cann. The two birds set up a tremendous singing and
chorussing when Miss Cann, spying the occasion of the first-floor
lodger’s absence, begins practising her music-pieces. Such trills,
roulades, and flourishes go on from the birds and the lodger! it is a
wonder how any fingers can move over the jingling ivory so quickly as
Miss Cann’s. Excellent a woman as she is, admirably virtuous, frugal,
brisk, honest, and cheerful, I would not like to live in lodgings where
there was a lady so addicted to playing variations. No more does
Honeyman. On a Saturday, when he is composing his valuable sermons (the
rogue, you may be sure, leaves his work to the last day, and there are,
I am given to understand, among the clergy many better men than
Honeyman, who are as dilatory as he), he begs, he entreats with tears
in his eyes, that Miss Cann’s music may cease. I would back little Cann
to write a sermon against him, for all his reputation as a popular
preacher.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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