CHAPTER XIV.
OF A LADY OF SENSIBILITY THAT, BEING AWKWARDLY PLACED, MIGHT EASILY HAVE SET MATTERS RIGHT, BUT DID NOT: WITH MUCH BESIDE.
It is hardly necessary by this time to inform my readers that Miss Priscilla Limpenny was a lady of sensibility.

We have already seen her obey the impulse of the heart rather than the cool dictates of judgment: her admiration of natural beauty she has herself confessed more than once during the voyage up the river.

But lest more than a due share of this admiration should be set down to patriotism, I wish to put it on record that she possessed to an uncommon degree an appreciative sense of the poetic side of Nature.

She was familiar with the works of Mrs.Hemans and L.E.L., and had got by heart most of the effusions in "Affection's Keepsake" and "Friendship's Offering." Nay, she had been, in her early youth, suspected, more than vaguely, of contributing fugitive verse to a periodical known as the _Household Packet_.

She had even, many years ago, met the Poet Wordsworth "at the dinner-table," as she expressed it, "of a common friend," and was never tired of relating how the great man had spoken of the prunes as "pruins," and said "Would you obleege me with the salt ?" With such qualifications for communion with nature it is not wonderful that, on this particular afternoon, Miss Limpenny should have wandered pensively along the river's bank, and surrendered herself to its romantic charm.