Free. Ah, but I can't help thinking! Have I not made the ground round his house, as well as my own, look like a well-weeded garden? I have cut down the old gloomy trees; and where he used to see nothing; from his windows but a parcel of old knotted oaks shaking themselves in the wind, he now looks upon two hundred rood of the best hot-walls in the North of England, besides two new summer-houses and a green-house,
Mrs. F. O he has no taste!
Free. The stream which I found running thro' the woods, as shaggy and as wild as if it had been in a desert island, and the foot of man never marked upon its banks, I have straightened, and levelled, and dressed, till the sides of it are as nice as a bowling-green.
Mrs. F. He has no more taste than a savage, that's certain. However, you must allow that he wants some advantages which you possess: his wife is a woman of no refinement.
Free. I don't know what you mean by refinement; She don't sing Italian and play upon the harp, I believe; but she is a very civil, obliging, good, reasonable woman.
Mrs. F. (contemptuously.) Yes, she is a very civil, obliging, good, reasonable woman. I wonder how some mothers can neglect the education of their children so! If she had been my daughter, I should have made a very different thing of her, indeed.
Free. I doubt nothing, my dear, of your good instructions and example. But here comes Jenkison.
