vows upon his honour that he was no drinker.  The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his countrymen, was not reassuring.  He had hopes of enlisting a trustier fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought of Lady Dunstane’s, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn taproom, and relieved him of the charge of the mare.  He was accommodated with a seat on a stool in the chariot.  ‘My triumphal car,’ said his captive.  She was very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to beg pardon for laughing.  ‘You are happy,’ observed her mistress.  But Redworth laughed too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little.  She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, ’Wherever I go now, in all weathers, I am perfectly naked!’ And remembering her readings of a certain wonderful old quarto book in her father’s library, by an eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and thinking.  Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of iridescent humour.  Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress’s gladness in not having pursued her bent to quit the country.  Redworth saw deeper, and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now dropping bolt upon things of passage—­the postillion jogging from rum to gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers.  She touched them to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft, derisively philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of her irony in mocking laughter.  The afternoon refreshments at the inn of the county market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes she made memorable to him.  She spoke of everything tolerantly, just naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed:  their host’s ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea, milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive genius—­these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.

‘Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,’ said Redworth.

’Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them with the magic wand of a postillion?’ said she.