loiter away her time at my mother's till the proper hour for going out to
visit. For five minutes she sat at some fashionable kind of work--_wafer
work_, I think it was called, a work which has been long since consigned to
the mice; then her ladyship yawned, and exclaiming, "Oh, those lines of
Lord Chesterfield's, which Colonel Topham gave me; I'll copy them into my
album. Where's my _album_?--Mrs. Harrington, I lent it to you. Oh! here it
is. Mr. Harrington, you will finish copying this for me." So I was set down
to the _album_ to copy--_Advice to a Lady in Autumn_.

"Asses' milk, half a pint, take at seven, or before."

My mother, who saw that I did not relish the asses' milk, put in a word for
me.

"My dear Lady Anne, it is not worth while to write these lines in your
_album_, for they were in print long ago, in every lady's old
memorandum-book, and in Dodsley's Collection, I believe."

"But still that was quite a different thing," Lady Anne said, "from having
them in her _album_; so Mr. Harrington must be so very good." I did not
understand the particular use of copying in my illegible hand what could be
so much better read in print; but it was all-sufficient that her ladyship
chose it. When I had copied the verses I must, Lady Anne said, read the
lines, and admire them. But I had read them twenty times before, and I
could not say that they were as fresh the twentieth reading as at the
first. Lord Mowbray came in, and she ran to her brother:--"Mowbray! can
any thing in nature be prettier than these verses of Lord Chesterfield?
Mowbray, you, who are a judge, listen to these two lines:

'The dews of the evening moat carefully shun,