Then he returned ;-his fluent lips so He scarce could give those dames the slip so Soon as he wished; But Hermes helped him on his trip, so The girls were dished. He heard the music of the Sirens, He heard the Cyclops hammer irons, Passed more adventures than Lord Byron's, Told many stretches, Then found, in Ithaca's environs, A crowd of wretches. "Well done, Willie," said the Squire, "you are the Homer of Scotland." CHAPTER IX. LOUISA. "From all theology apart, What multitudinous questions start! And the queer book begins at Finis. Most difficult to rhyme, you'll say: Add one, one-fifth, one-ninth, and so on, HE Reverend Arundel Saint Osyth was, THE about the time which our narrative has reached, joined by his niece, sole child of his elder brother, Louisa Osyth Saint Osyth. She was left an orphan at eighteen, her father and mother dying within a month of each other; but she was left with a good estate and a wise and kind guardian in her bachelor uncle. Louisa had two peculiarities: she was very High Church and very learned. She was no impostor in this last, like the immortal Doña Inez. She read Greek and wrote Latin. Some of her Latin hymns had delighted the bishop of the diocese, especially one beginning "Consolator, felix avis ! Semper amans, semper suavis." She was as incapable of a false quantity as of a faux pas. Moreover, Louisa was a geometrician, and an algebraist, and knew lots of things unknown to the ordinary wearers of petticoats. With all which, Louisa was devoid of intellectual vanity, having indeed learnt enough to estimate the immense regions of knowledge which no mortal mind shall ever traverse. Miss Saint Osyth was some time in Silchester before she grew at all intimate with the Squire's family. The Squire, a very good churchman in the Christian sense, was not particularly interested in the Rector's earnest experiments. They got on very well in the parish, because they never interfered with each other. The Squire was always ready to supply money for charitable purposes, and knew that in the rector he had a wise and equitable almoner. If recalcitrant parishioners complained that their parson robed himself too pavonically, or made the church too radiant at Easter, the Squire quietly reminded them that he preached intelligible sermons, and was good to the poor. Certes, the Rector took to preaching capital sermons of a simple sort at a certain date, though previously he had been much given to casuistry, and to finding double meanings in his texts. He took to simplicity soon after Louisa's arrival, and the Squire told his wife that he was sure that young lady made his sermons. Did she? She did. After one or two Sundays at church she found herself bewildered by her uncle's ontology. He was more perplexing than Athanasius. He was always demolishing the Sabellians, or the Pelagians, or some other heretics that were forgotten long before the time of dear oysters. Louisa, sitting Sunday after Sunday in the Rector's pew in the chancel, got very tired of these unintelligible disquisitions, and at last was driven to protest. It happened in this wise. The Rector, on Sunday, always ate supper. It was a day when he had no time to dine. His cook, a mistress of her art, used to dish him up a homely supper at about nine-a bit of steak and some asparagus, perhaps, or some broiled bones and potatoes boiled in their jackets, or an omelet. After exhausting himself over metaphysical sermons that puzzled himself, and his neice, and the parish-and would have puzzled the Squire, if the Squire ever listened-he needed refection. Over those |