and of their effects; told me how he slept and how he eat; and read dissertations without end on chronic disorders in general; and from this discourse he glided by some link which escaped me, into his other favourite science, heraldry. Oh! the quarterings and bearings which I was compelled to affect hearing; the genealogies I was distracted with; and the marriages and intermarriages to which I appeared to listen, while in fact I knew nothing of what he said, and only endured this sort of martyrdom in the hope of seeing Lady Castlenorth,

who on my first visits did not deign to appear.
All these latter harangues were, I found, intended to impress on my mind the pride and prudence which would attend a union with my cousin, his daughter, and the advantage it would give me above any other alliance I could form. My patient acquiescence was imputed to returning inclination for this boasted connection; and when I was thought to be sufficiently impressed with the ideas thus meant to be conveyed to me, and to be weaned from the weakness I had betrayed, I was admitted, without any solicitation however on my part, to the honour of seeing Lady Castlenorth and her daughter.
The elder lady was the only one of them with whom I wished to have any conversation, and her love of hearing herself talk obtained me this favour, in spite of all the displeasure she had conceived against me: but it was very difficult

to bring her to converse on that subject which alone interested me: she would talk politics, or give me a dissertation on the nature of the soul, or on the eruptions of Vesuvius, descant on the age of the world, or on her own age,(if her auditors would allow her to be not quite five and forty:) but of Celestina she would not talk; and if ever I, in spite of her evasions, introduced the conversation, she affected to hear me with horror, and to consider every mention I made of a person whom she called so connected with me, as the most indelicate and improper conversation with which I could entertain her. She was for the most part surrounded, when I was admitted to her, with abbati, and the oracle of a circle she had herself formed, in which it was generally impracticable to entertain her with any other conversation than that she chose to lead to.

Her daughter, who had formerly received me with so much haughtiness, and who had since been offended in the tenderest point, a point too in which her extreme vanity had rendered her particularly susceptible, affected no longer the overweening