"Yours ever and ever,

"ANASTASIA RAFFARTY.

"P.S. And I hope to make the gentlemen stop the night with me: so
will not have beds. Excuse haste and compliments, &c.

"_Tusculum, Sunday 15._"

After a charming tour in the county of Wicklow, where the beauty of
the natural scenery, and the taste with which those natural beauties
had been cultivated, far surpassed the sanguine expectations Lord
Colambre had formed, his lordship and his companions arrived at
Tusculum, where he found Mrs. Raffarty, and Miss Juliana O'Leary,
very elegant, with a large party of the ladies and gentlemen of Bray,
assembled in a drawing-room, fine with bad pictures and gaudy gilding;
the windows were all shut, and the company were playing cards with all
their might. This was the fashion of the neighbourhood. In compliment
to Lord Colambre and the officers, the ladies left the card-tables;
and Mrs. Raffarty, observing that his lordship seemed _partial_ to
walking, took him out, as she said, "to do the honours of nature and
art."

His lordship was much amused by the mixture, which was now exhibited
to him, of taste and incongruity, ingenuity and absurdity, genius
and blunder; by the contrast between the finery and vulgarity, the
affectation and ignorance, of the lady of the villa. We should be
obliged to _stop_ too long at Tusculum were we to attempt to detail
all the odd circumstances of this visit; but we may record an example