Right Honourable the Earl of Kew, and that of his daughter, Lady Anne
Newcome, attended that revered lady's remains to their final
resting-place. No less than nine sermons were preached at various places
of public worship regarding her end. She fell upstairs at a very advanced
age, going from the library to the bedroom, after all the household was
gone to rest, and was found by the maids in the morning, inarticulate,
but still alive, her head being cut frightfully with the bedroom candle
with which she was retiring to her apartment. "And," said Mr. Giles with
great energy, "besides the empty carriages at that funeral, and the
parson in black, and the mutes and feathers and that, there were hundreds
and hundreds of people who wore no black, and who weren't present; and
who wept for their benefactress, I can tell you. She had her faults, and
many of 'em; but the amount of that woman's charities are unheard of,
sir--unheard of,--and they are put to the credit side of her account up
yonder.

"The old lady had a will of her own," my companion continued. "She would
try and know about everybody's business out of business hours: got to
know from the young clerks what chapels they went to, and from the
clergymen whether they attended regular; kept her sons, years after they
were grown men, as if they were boys at school--and what was the
consequence? They had a quarrel with Sir Thomas Newcome's own son, a
harum-scarum lad, who ran away, and then was sent to India; and, between
ourselves, Mr. Hobson and Mr. Brian both, the present Baronet, though at
home they were as mum as Quakers at a meeting, used to go out on the sly,
sir, and be off to the play, sir, and sowed their wild oats like any
other young men, sir, like any other young men. Law bless me, once, as I
was going away from the Haymarket, if I didn't see Mr. Hobson coming out
of the Opera, in tights and an opera-hat, sir, like 'Froggy would wooing
go,' of a Saturday-night, too, when his ma thought him safe in bed in the