Enter Mrs. B—— and her brother, who prosed me out of Spa, begged me from Lausanne, and hummed me into such a lethargy at Geneva that it is a mercy I was not buried alive! They are the best poor dears on earth—and there’s the worst of it.
I had my cheek kissed by the sister, and my hand by the
brother, for ten minutes at least, by the town clock—not rapid electrics,
but long-drawn kisses,
| LETTERS AND GOSSIP. | 125 |
The kissing over, the prosing began.
Mrs. B—— took the lead, comme de raison, opened the campaign d’ennui, with unwonted vigour; the fun was to see her brother deliberately taking up his posture of patience, like a general on active service, his heavy lids gently falling over his heavy eyes, his very nostrils breathing stupefaction.
Observe, for it is good to know the outer and visible signs of our natural enemies, Bores have noses peculiar to themselves. The nose of a German Bore is a sort of long, broad, romantic, rather aquiline, and rather drooping nose—the drooping nose characterises invariably the nosology of a bore—in a word, it is the leading feature.
But to return; Mrs. B—— began with an account
of her journey. Not a stage, not a turn in the road, not a cross that I had
gone over six days before but was described to me, first en gros and then en détail; but this was
nothing—at least it was fact, topographical fact—but to my utter
despair, every village, town, and house, “put her in mind” of some
cottage, town, road, street, or something, in Ireland, Scotland, or
England—something had happened to her in one or all of the aforesaid
places. But still this was nothing; they were graphic
pictures, however ill-drawn—it was the moral
demonstrations, the particular parentheses, which left me without hope, help,
or resource; every beggar, post, landlord, or landlady, “put her in
mind” of her mother’s housemaid, who used to say when
| 126 | LADY MORGAN'S MEMOIR. |
The dear B——’s have drunk like sparrows
and swelled like crows, but drunk a little of everything, “from humble
port to imperial tokay,” and it is this that renders them more
tiresome in their prosy scraps than the most obdurate ignorance could ever make
itself. No one could be in the room a moment after Mr. B—— came in,
without knowing that he was a geologist, botanist,
archæologist,—everything. He began by complaining of all he had
suffered from heat, and I gave him my whole share of sympathy! But when he got
upon the causes, and talked of the fundamental laws of
nature, I started up in the midst of a diatribe on cosmogony, and in despair,
exclaimed, “My dear Mr. B——, you are aware that God made the
world in six days, and did not say one word about cosmogony!” It might be
thought that was a hard hit;—not at all, he took it gravely and began a
disquisition on the Mosaic account. The word Moses
over-
| LETTERS AND GOSSIP. | 127 |
