Blanche Delaware looked up in Dr. Wilton's face with a smile full of playful meaning. "Do not judge him by that," replied the clergyman, speaking to the smile's purport--"do not judge him by that; I have known him from his boyhood. He was my pupil as a youth, and has been my friend as a man--and--" "And that is evidence beyond rejection that he is all that is good and amiable?" said Miss Delaware, seriously. "Ay, and though he can talk her own kind of nonsense to a worthy lady like that," replied Dr. Wilton, determined to revenge himself on Miss Delaware for her smile, "he can talk nonsense equally agreeable to younger and fairer ladies, my dear Blanche. So take care of your little heart, my pretty dame." Miss Delaware laughed gayly, in the full, ignorant confidence of a heart that had known no wound; and the conversation dropped as far as it regarded Burrel. He himself prolonged the idle gossip with which he was amusing himself for some time; but finding, or fancying, that the elder lady who sat next to him possessed a mind that could appreciate better things, he gradually led the conversation to matters of more general interest than _pieds de cochons à la St. Menehould_, or the portraiture of gravel walks. It is the most difficult man[oe]uvre in the tactics of conversation, and shows greater skill, when executed neatly, than any other evolution whatever, to change at once from the flimsy and the foolish to the substantial and the good, without deviating into the heavy--to slide down the diapason from the high notes of common-place chatter, to the fine tenor of calm and sensible discourse, touching each semitone and enharmonic difference as one goes, till the change is scarcely felt, though the music may be richer. Burrel could do it when he liked; but now he overdid it. From French dishes he speedily got to France and the French people, and thence to the difference between the French and English character, with an easy facility that made the alteration of the subject seem nothing strange; but then he went a little beyond. "The French," he said, in answer to a question from his neighbor, "have nothing of that sort of thing that we would call 'national modesty.' They would look upon it as _mauvaise honte_, and each Frenchman thinks himself fully justified in praising his own country to the skies. It is they who believe it, that are foolish. They, the French, call themselves the most civilized, well-informed people in the world; and yet go into the provinces, and you will find a peasantry more generally ignorant than perhaps any other country can show. I myself resided for many months in a part of one of the most cultivated departments of France, where the farmer on either hand of the house in which I dwelt during the hunting season--each renting many hundreds of acres of land--could neither read nor write. Where could such a thing be found in England?"