LOVES OF THE LORDS AND LADIES. BY T. HAYNES BAYLY, ESQ. No. III. THE LORD AND THE JEWESS. COME open your casement, Miss Moses; He dreams of some plan by which copper But you are yourself the bright jewel How splendid 'twill look on your brow. To help me to have it re-gilt. Come down, then, my excellent Jewess; Come down, lest my voice should be heard: I'll show you how fond and how true is Still cling to your Jewish persuasion, Come, Zillah, I'll make you my Lady; Come, if your portmanteau is ready, But do not suspect that I covet The wealth of your father, good man : Gold bores me, in fact, and I'll prove it By spending as fast as I can. Believe me, great people are noted And such very stay-at-home wives! Faux-pas and crim-cons and divorces Oh come then, my embryo Lady, I'm sure your relations will double Your fortune, rejoic'd at the news, They love me so, that, when in trouble, I always apply to the Jews. THE DEFUNCT. BY T. HAYNES BAYLY, ESQ. HAVING made a candid avowal of my predilection for old women, I may appear inconsistent when I protest that I have always made a jest of their superstitions. An old woman's story, particularly if it had a ghost in it, was from my very boyhood received by me with a laugh or with a sneer. But this is no proof that my love for old women is insincere. Are we not all too apt to trifle with the weaknesses of those most dear to us? This incredulity of mine was not, however, calculated to awaken in my elderly idols a reciprocity of attachment; and there was one old woman in particular, who evidently disliked my irreverent laugh, and yet seemed determined to win me over to the full enjoyment of the pleasures of her imagination. And most imaginative she was-assigning to every old mansion its spectre, to every corner-cupboard its midnight visitant. She could give the most elaborate version of all old stories; and whilst she narrated the mysterious and supernatural, she would glance with indignation at him who ventured to trace her stories to the excited nerves of individuals, or indeed to any other natural cause. She lived in a habitation most congenial to her temperament, an old Elizabethan mansion forming three sides of a quadrangle, with a large, lofty, shadowy hall, very long passages, tapestried chambers, and surrounded by a moat. In this house I have spent some of the happiest days of my life; and it was in my boyhood, during the long winter evenings of my holidays, that I first listened to, and laughed at, the wonderful stories of old mistress Sally Douce. Though Sally was a very important personage at Maltby Hall, the reader is not to suppose that she was the lady of the mansion. My host was Sir Charles Maltby, a young baronet of three-and-twenty, and my hostess, his beautiful bride, was in her nineteenth year. In the schoolboy days to which I have alluded, I had been the guest of older persons, the father and mother of my friend Sir Charles, then a schoolboy like myself, -but the venerable pair now reposed in peace under the family pew in the neighbouring church, and Charles, former playfellow, being now a baronet and a married man, invariably gave me a hospitable reception. my Mistress Sally Douce had been housekeeper at Maltby Hall for fifty years; and having been born in a cottage on the estate, she considered herself, and really seemed to be considered by my friends, one of the family, Charles used to be her greatest pet. Whilst I laughed outright at her most marvellous narratives, he laughed only in his sleeve; and when I was affronting the venerable story-teller by a voluntary and most unnecessary avowal of disbelief, he would soothe her into smiles, by affecting to shudder, declaring at the same time that she made him afraid to turn his head lest he should see the spectre at his elbow. Still I believe I was rather a favourite; at all events I was always sure to hear her very best stories, told in her very best style. It was indeed natural she would wish to make a convert of so great a sceptic as I professed to be. To the reader I will confess what I never could be induced to own to the old lady-her stories, or rather perhaps her manner of telling them, often made a very deep impression on me; and my incredulity, at first assumed, because I thought the world imputed cowardice to the credulous, was afterwards persisted in, partly from a desire to appear consistent, but principally to irritate Mrs. Douce. All this may seem a little unamiable; but it must be remembered that I was a mere youth at the time of which I speak; indeed, all that I am about to tell, happened when I was but three-and-twenty. I carried my bravado so far, that after laughing at all her ghost-stories, I declared that to live in a haunted house, to sleep in a haunted chamber,-nay, actually to be visited by a real authenticated ghost, would be to me delightful! Then did Sally Douce shake at me her wrinkled head, point at me her attenuated finger, and solemnly and slowly say: "Young man, young man, beware of what you say. If the dead can visit the living, when I am buried in Maltby church-yard we shall meet again! It shortly afterwards seemed but too probable that I should be myself the first inhabitant of that bit of consecrated ground. It was Christmas time: I was as usual the guest of my friend Charles, and never was there a merrier Christmas circle than that formed by myself and the family of my friend. His brothers and sisters were with him at the time, and we were all as gay as health and youth could make us. Lady Maltby, though already a mother, was the greatest child of the party; and we were none of us ashamed of hide-and-seek, hunt-theslipper, or puss in the corner. |