Why it should necessitate, as it seems to do, the proprietorship of a half-bred stallion, three pointers, an Angola cat, the smallest terrier, and the largest mastiff I ever saw, one cockatoo, and a dozen Cochin-China fowls is more than I can take upon me to expound. Probably Mrs. Naggett knows; for she has repeatedly demanded, not without high words, an explanation of its mysterious intricacies.
I should not say, from all I have heard, that Mr. Naggett is a domestic man. The habitual wearing of top-boots, combined with fancy waistcoats, I believe to be inimical to the fireside qualities. Although there are two or three Naggetts, with dark eyes like their mother, and flaxen curls like their father, to be seen playing at hide-and-seek amongst the grove of dead pigs and sheep that pervade the premises, and Mr. N. seems to notice and be fond of the urchins, yet loud altercations are often to be heard in his private residence behind the slaughter-house, and Mrs. N.’s dark eyes are not always undimmed by tears. Fame, however, whose hundred tongues are no less ubiquitous at Waterborough than elsewhere, does not scruple to intimate that the butcher’s lady is quite able to “hold her own;” and the gossips have been heard to affirm, with dark and threatening glances at their own liege lords the while, that “though she has been so put upon, poor dear, she can give him as good as he brings, and quite right too.” The inference is obvious, the moral doubtless not without its effect.
It was not in my nature to fraternise very cordially with a gentleman of Mr. Naggett’s superior qualities. I am bound, nevertheless, to admit, that his advances towards myself were cordial, not to say familiar in the extreme. The undisguised admiration, however, with which Miss Lushington regarded his every movement, and the terms of intimacy on which he obviously stood with that decorous lady, may have prejudiced me somewhat against him. There is a class of men, however, I have often observed, and I say it in justice to Miss Lushington, with whom the genus Barmaid seems to possess some mysterious affinity. As Eastern poets feign that there is a certain bird to which the tree involuntarily bends its branches, and the flower opens its petals, so I am convinced there is a description of individual who is looked on with peculiar favour by actresses, barmaids, hostesses, and other ladies whose avocations bring them much into the presence of a discerning public. These favourites of her sex are generally remarkable for exuberance of spirits, command of language, a vivid freshness of complexion, and general freedom of manner. They are loud in assumption, and great on all topics of political or public interest; also prone to plunge into quarrels, from which they invariably extricate themselves without recourse to ulterior measures. His female admirers, in describing such a one, generally sum up their catalogue of his merits by vowing that he is “very free in company, and _quite the gentleman_.”