“In the afternoon we were to have gone to the Heathpool Lynn, but did go to Langley Ford by mistake--a very long walk, after leaving the carriage, up a bleak moorland valley. I walked chiefly with Miss Lindsay. She talked of the extraordinary discovery of the well at Castle Hedingham by ‘a wise woman’ by the power of the hazel wand--the hazel twig bending on the right spot, not only upon the ground itself, but upon the representation of it on the map. She talked of the blind and dumb Sabbatarianism of the Presbyterians. She asked a respectable poor woman how she liked the new preacher. ‘Wad I presume?’ she replied.”
“_Oct. 18._--This morning Lady Waterford wished that the Misses Lindsay had been dressed alike even in details. ‘It is a law of nature, I think, that sisters should dress alike. A covey of partridges are all alike; they do not want to have feathers of different colours; and why not children of the same family?’
[Illustration: LANGLEY FORD, IN THE CHEVIOTS.][67]
“We had a charming walk to Etal in the afternoon--lovely soft lights on the distant hills, and brilliant reflections of the autumnal foliage in the Till. We went to the castle, and then down the glen by St. Mary’s Oratory and Well. Lady W. talked of the beauty of the sedges and of their great variety--of the difficult law, or rather no law, of reflections. Then of marriages--of the number of widows being so much greater than that of widowers, and of the change which the loss of a husband made in all the smallest details of life: of the supreme desolation of Lady Charlotte Denison, ‘after a honeymoon of forty-three years.’ Old Lady Tankerville was of another nature. She was urging a widowed friend to do something. ‘Oh, but my cap, my cap!’ groaned the friend. ‘Comment,’ exclaimed Lady Tankerville, ‘c’est le vrai bonnet de la liberté.’
“Speaking of complexions--‘My grandmother used to say,’ said Mrs. Fairholme, ‘that beauty “went out” with open carriages. “Why, you are just like men, my dear,” she said, “with your brown necks, and your rough skins, and your red noses. In our days it was different; young ladies never walked, ate nothing but white meat, and never washed their faces. They covered their faces with powder, and then put cold cream on, and wiped it off with a flannel: that was the way to have a good complexion.’”