over a new-born prince, and told me, forsooth, that Madame Muscovy was but just brought to bed, which Peggy Trevor soon came and confirmed.  I told them I would write you my adventure.  I have not thanked you for your travels, and the violent curiosity you have given me to see Welbeck.  Mr. Chute and I have been a progress too; but it was in a land you know full well, the county of Kent.  I will only tell you that we broke our necks twenty times to your health, and had a distant glimpse of Hawkhurst from that Sierra Morena, Silver Hill.  I have since been with Mr. Conway at Park-place, where I saw the individual Mr. Cooper, a banker, and lord of the manor of Henley, who had those two extraordinary forfeitures from the executions of the Misses Blandy and Jefferies, two fields from the former, and a malthouse from the latter.  I had scarce credited the story, and was pleased to hear it confirmed by the very person; though it was not quite so remarkable as it was reported, for both forfeitures were in the same manor.

Mr. Conway has brought Lady Ailesbury from Minorca, but originally from Africa, a Jeribo.  To be sure you know what that is; if you don’t, I will tell you, and then I believe you will scarce know any better.  It is a composition of a squirrel, a hare, a rat, and a monkey, which altogether looks very like a bird.  In short, it is about the size of the first, with much Such a head, except that the tip of the nose seems shaved off, and the remains are like a human hare-lip; the ears and its timidity are like a real hare.  It has two short little feet before like a rat, but which it never uses for walking, I believe never but to hold its food.  The tail is naked like a monkey’s, with a tuft of hair at the end; striped black and white in rings.  The two hind legs are as long as a Granville’s, with feet more like a bird than any other animal, and upon these it hops so immensely fast and upright that at a distance you would take it for a large thrush.  It lies in cotton, is brisk at night, eats wheat, and never drinks; it would, but drinking is fatal to them.  Such is a Jeribo!

Have you heard the particulars of the Speaker’s quarrel with a young officer, who went to him, on his landlord refusing to give his servant the second best bed in the inn?  He is a young man of eighteen hundred a year, and passionately fond of the army.  The Speaker produced the Mutiny-bill to him.  “Oh Sir,” said the lad, “but there is another act of parliament which perhaps you don’t know of.”  The “person of dignity,” as the newspapers call him, then was so ingenious as to harangue on the dangers of a standing army.  The boy broke out, “Don’t tell me of your privileges:  what would have become of you and your privileges in the year forty-five, if it had not been for the army—­and pray, why do you fancy I would betray my country?  I have as much to lose as you have!” In short, this abominable young hector treated the Speaker’s oracular decisions with a familiarity that quite shocks me to think of!