The ladies, meantime, jested with Miss Vere on the strange interview
they had just had with the far-famed wizard of the Moor. "Isabella has
all the luck at home and abroad! Her hawk strikes down the black-cock;
her eyes wound the gallant; no chance for her poor companions and
kinswomen; even the conjuror cannot escape the force of her charms. You
should, in compassion, cease to be such an engrosser, my dear Isabel, or
at least set up shop, and sell off all the goods you do not mean to keep
for your own use."

"You shall have them all," replied Miss Vere, "and the conjuror to boot,
at a very easy rate."

"No! Nancy shall have the conjuror," said Miss Ilderton, "to supply
deficiencies; she's not quite a witch herself, you know."

"Lord, sister," answered the younger Miss Ilderton, "what could I do
with so frightful a monster? I kept my eyes shut, after once glancing at
him; and, I protest, I thought I saw him still, though I winked as close
as ever I could."

"That's a pity," said her sister; "ever while you live, Nancy, choose an
admirer whose faults can be hid by winking at them.--Well, then, I must
take him myself, I suppose, and put him into mamma's Japan cabinet,
in order to show that Scotland can produce a specimen of mortal clay
moulded into a form ten thousand times uglier than the imaginations of
Canton and Pekin, fertile as they are in monsters, have immortalized in
porcelain."

"There is something," said Miss Vere, "so melancholy in the situation of