Park; for the coronation of his Majesty, whom you recollect as
Prince of Wales, Goody, don't you? Yes; and you went in a
procession of laundresses to pay your respects to his good lady,
the injured Queen of England, at Brandenburg House; and you
remember your mother told you how she was taken to see the Scotch
lords executed at the Tower. And as for your grandmother, she
was born five months after the battle of Malplaquet, she was;
where her poor father was killed, fighting like a bold Briton for
the Queen. With the help of a "Wade's Chronology," I can make
out ever so queer a history for you, my poor old body, and a
pedigree as authentic as many in the peerage-books.

Peerage-books and pedigrees? What does she know about them?
Battles and victories, treasons, kings, and beheadings, literary
gentlemen, and the like, what have they ever been to her?
Granny, did you ever hear of General Wolfe? Your mother may have
seen him embark, and your father may have carried a musket under
him. Your grandmother may have cried huzza for Marlborough; but
what is the Prince Duke to you, and did you ever so much as hear
tell of his name? How many hundred or thousand of years had that
toad lived who was in the coal at the defunct exhibition? -- and
yet he was not a bit better informed than toads seven or eight
hundred years younger.

"Don't talk to me your nonsense about Exhibitions, and Prince
Dukes, and toads in coals, or coals in toads, or what is it?"
says granny. "I know there was a good Queen Charlotte, for she
left me snuff; and it comforts me of a night when I lie awake."

To me there is something very touching in the notion of that