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proposed to give poor Alexander Murdoch Christian burial, but true to her principle of dissenting from Mrs. Wearygab, she immediately retorted

:

"Bring it home to your ain sel' if any of your friends or acquaintance, forbye relatives, had drowned themsel's, how wad ye like the minister to refuse them Christian burial ?"

"Friends or nae friends," said Mrs. Grainger, "ye'll nae catch Mr. Mucklewhackit, or any other respeckit minister, attending the burial o' Alexander Murdoch or any ither body wha makes awa' wi' himsel'."

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Weel, I wadna like to be Mr. Mucklewhackit, to refuse the laddie's friends," said Miss Scunnerweel.

Ernest had heard quite enough to satisfy him of the depth of philanthropy and Christianity of Mrs. Grainger and her friends.

CHAPTER X.

MRS. GRAINGER'S CONVERZAZIONE

MODEL YOUNG LADIES.

CONTINUED

THE attention of the company was now directed to a song. The eldest Miss Flaccid had been prevailed upon to sing. The three Misses Flaccids were, as we have already said, model young ladies. They go to church on Sundays with their bonnets half on their heads, to confess themselves miserable sinners, and then return to fill up the measure of their wickedness during the week with shopping, croziering, pic-nics, and dances. They are not particularly fond of reading, though they own, of course, to Scott's and Cooper's novels, and they believe to a great extent in Uncle Tom's Cabin, also that the world is round; but if you were to ask them what causes night and day, and the changes of the seasons, they would be puzzled to answer. They have heard that Galileo

discovered something, and know that Columbus discovered America. They are very fond of ladies un

"work" in the sense in which young derstand it, and they multiply varieties of patterns of crochet to cover the backs of sofas and arm-chairs, and make wonderful little nondescript baskets, &c., which can be put to no imaginable use, typical of an idle, useless existence. Their conversation is generally on local topics, about the bonnet worn by Brigadier Blazer's lady at church, whether Miss Young will really come out at the next assembly, and whether Ensign Spark will really marry Miss Gadd. Mrs. Flaccid boasts that that she knows every thought in her daughters' heads, and she may do so without possessing any very original ideas. Of one thing we may be sure, that the Misses Flaccid would never have a thought that was outré or odd. Propriety is written on every line of their countenances, it lurks in the braids of their hair, in the primness of their pursed-up mouths, and may be discovered in their very waists, narrowed to

the exact measurement recognised as the improvement of art over nature. We cannot call the Misses Flaccid young women, nor do they appear ever to have been girls. They are young ladies, and to a man who has still a chord responsive to nature left in his bosom, are thoroughly insipid. There is no occasion to individualise them-they are all alike. They will laugh, chat, coquet, and polka through their allotted number of seasons, laying traps with the proper degree of secresy for eligible husbands. None of them will be influenced by such an incumbrance as a heart and feelings in determining her choice. Manly beauty, manly intellect, and manly worth will pass before them undiscovered, uncomprehended, and disregarded, and when each has succeeded in hooking the man sufficiently well off in worldly gear to be an eligible parti, each will display the same becoming amount of maidenly astonishment, and perturbation, and physical depression at the proposal which she has waited, angled, dressed, and danced for so long.

Miss Flaccid, on being asked to sing, was sure that she had no voice, (in which, by the bye, she was quite correct) then, that she had a cold, and that she really couldn't; whereupon everybody in the immediate neighbourhood declared that Miss Flaccid's singing would make them so happy, and Miss Flaccid, either from not being proof against so general a desire of happiness, or thinking that she had been pressed sufficiently, and that she had better sing while she had the opportunity, hemmed the proper number of times, and began. Her singing was really miraculous in one sense, for she really had no voice in the sense in which vocalists are said to possess a voice. She sang without feeling, taste, expression, or harmony, just the sort of song through which everybody talks, and at the close of which everybody says thank you, neither knowing nor caring what the song is about, with perhaps a feeling of gratitude to the young lady who has been thumping the piano and murmuring in cadence for the last

VOL. I.

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