The Surgeons Daughter | Page 5

course; and
on the appointed Saturday, I was at the door precisely as it struck four.
The dinner hour, indeed, was five punctually; but what did I know but
my friend might want half an hour's conversation with me before that
time? I was ushered into an empty drawing-room, and, from a
needle-book and work-basket hastily abandoned, I had some reason to
think I interrupted my little friend, Miss Katie, in some domestic labour
more praiseworthy than elegant. In this critical age, filial piety must
hide herself in a closet, if she has a mind to darn her father's linen.
Shortly after, I was the more fully convinced that I had been too early

an intruder when a wench came to fetch away the basket, and
recommend to my courtesies a red and green gentleman in a cage, who
answered all my advances by croaking out, "You're a fool--you're a
fool, I tell you!" until, upon my word, I began to think the creature was
in the right. At last my friend arrived, a little overheated. He had been
taking a turn at golf, to prepare him for "colloquy sublime." And
wherefore not? since the game, with its variety of odds, lengths,
bunkers, tee'd balls, and so on, may be no inadequate representation of
the hazards attending literary pursuits. In particular, those formidable
buffets, which make one ball spin through the air like a rifle-shot, and
strike another down into the very earth it is placed upon, by the
mal-adroitness, or the malicious purpose of the player--what are they
but parallels to the favourable or depreciating notices of the reviewers,
who play at golf with the publications of the season, even as Altisidora,
in her approach to the gates of the infernal regions, saw the devils
playing at racket with the new books of Cervantes' days.
Well, every hour has its end. Five o'clock came, and my friend, with his
daughters, and his handsome young son, who, though fairly buckled to
the desk, is every now and then looking over his shoulder at a smart
uniform, set seriously about satisfying the corporeal wants of nature; I,
stimulated by a nobler appetite after fame, wished that the touch of a
magic wand could, without all the ceremony of picking and choosing,
carving and slicing, masticating and swallowing, have transported a
quantum sufficit of the good things on my friend's hospitable board,
into the stomachs of those who surrounded it, to be there at leisure
converted into chyle, while their thoughts were turned on higher
matters. At length all was over. But the young ladies sat still, and talked
of the music of the Freischutz, for nothing else was then thought of; so
we discussed the wild hunter's song, and the tame hunter's song, &c.
&c., in all which my young friends were quite at home. Luckily for me,
all this horning and hooping drew on some allusion to the Seventh
Hussars, which gallant regiment, I observe, is a more favourite theme
with both Miss Catherine and her brother than with my old friend, who
presently looked at his watch, and said something significantly to Mr.
James about office hours. The youth got up with the ease of a youngster
that would be thought a man of fashion rather than of business, and

endeavoured, with some success, to walk out of the room, as if the
locomotion was entirely voluntary; Miss Catherine and her sisters left
us at the same time, and now, thought I, my trial comes on.
Reader, did you ever, in the course of your life, cheat the courts of
justice and lawyers, by agreeing to refer a dubious and important
question to the decision of a mutual friend? If so, you may have
remarked the relative change which the arbiter undergoes in your
estimation, when raised, though by your own free choice, from an
ordinary acquaintance, whose opinions were of as little consequence to
you as yours to him, into a superior personage, on whose decision your
fate must depend pro tanto, as my friend Mr. Fairscribe would say. His
looks assume a mysterious if not a minatory expression; his hat has a
loftier air, and his wig, if he wears one, a more formidable buckle.
I felt, accordingly, that my good friend Fairscribe, on the present
occasion, had acquired something of a similar increase of consequence.
But a week since, he had, in my opinion, been indeed an
excellent-meaning man, perfectly competent to every thing within his
own profession, but immured, at the same time, among its forms and
technicalities, and as incapable of judging of matters of taste as any
mighty Goth whatsoever, of or belonging to the ancient Senate-House
of Scotland. But what of that? I had made him my judge by my own
election; and I