to pull the bell-rope, as it hung invitingly down just within the entrance; and she greatly scandalized the beadle by doing so, still she pacified him with a shilling.”
“But now about Mr. Van Valkenburgh,” proceeded Mrs. Brockendale, “this I am certain of, that we met him on the Alps, and we were joined up there by old General Offenham and his son, who was much taken with Isabella. It might have been a match, for the young man will be a half-millionaire one of these days; but he has fits, and rolls down mountains. So that rather discouraged us, and we thought that nobody would ever marry him. Yet, afterwards, at Paris, or Portsmouth, or some of those places, the widow Sweeting snapped up young Offenham, for her third husband. So Isabella might as well have taken him.”
“My sister,” said Augustina, turning to Sophia, “is happily married to a man of sense, as well as of large fortune, and high respectability.”
“Mr. Van Valkenburgh,” pursued Mrs. Brockendale, “was telling how delightful he found the literary society of England. I wish I had been in it, when I was there. He became acquainted with them all. He even knew Shakspeare.”
“His plays, of course,” said Sophia.
“Oh! no, the man himself. Shakspeare called on him at the hotel, and left his card for Mr. Van Valkenburgh.”
“Excuse me,” said Sophia, “Shakspeare has been dead considerably more than two hundred years.”
“Ah! my dear young lady,” observed Mrs. Brockendale, “you know we must not believe all we hear.”
“Mamma, we had best go home,” said her daughter, who had sat for some moments looking as if too angry to speak, leaving to Sophia the explanation concerning Shakspeare.
Mrs. Brockendale rose to depart. “If it was not Shakspeare that called on him, it must have been Dr. Johnson,” said she. “Any how, it was some great author.”
They then took their leave, Miss Brockendale expressing a desire to be intimately acquainted with Miss Fayland.
“Poor Mrs. Brockendale,” said Sophia, “her head reminds me
