outraging sporting rules by firing out of time, and flushing coveys
prematurely by unseasonable talking and precipitate strides in
advance of his disgusted companions.

Yet he was not a fool. In the discussion of graver
matters--politics, law, and history--that arose in the smoking-room,
he was not to be put down by more fluent tongues; demolished
sophistry by solid reasoning, impregnable assertions, and an array
of facts that might be prolix, but was always formidable--in short,
sustained fully the character ascribed to him by his brother-in-law,
of a "thoroughly sensible fellow."

"No genius, I allow!" Mr. Aylett would add, in speaking of his
wife's bantling among his compatriots, "but a man whose industry and
sound practical knowledge of every branch of his profession will
make for him the fortune and name genius rarely wins."

With the younger ladies, his society was, it is superfluous to
observe, at the lowest premium civility and native kindliness of
disposition would permit them to declare by the nameless and
innumerable methods in which the dear creatures are proficient. To
Rosa Tazewell he could not be anything better than a target for the
arrows of her satire, or the whetstone, upon the unyielding surface
of which she sharpened them. But she showed her prudential foresight
in never laughing at him when out of his sight, and in Mabel's. At
long ago as the night of Mr. Aylett's wedding-party at Ridgeley, her
sharp eyes had seen, or she fancied they did, that the hum-drum
groomsman was mightily captivated by the daughter of the house, and
she had divined that Mrs. Aylett's clever ruses for throwing the two
together were the outworks of her design for uniting, by a double