University of Virginia Library

July 21.—

We dined to-day according to appointment with Mrs. Gerrarde. A cottage she called her house, nor does it appear much better at the out-side, but within it is a fairy palace. Never was any thing so neat, so elegant, so perfectly well fancied, as the fitting up of all her rooms. Her bedchambers are furnished with fine chintz, and her drawing-room with the

prettiest Indian sattin I ever saw. Her little villa is called Ashby, and her husband, she told me, purchased it for her sometime before his death, and left it to her; but she has since had a considerable addition to her fortune by the death of a relation.

Our entertainment was splendid almost to profusion, though there was no company but Mr. Arnold and I. I told her, if she always gave such dinners, it would frighten me away from her: indeed it was the only circumstance in her whole conduct that did not please me, for I was charmed with the rest of her behaviour. They must surely be of a very churlish disposition, who are not pleased where a manifest desire to oblige is conspicuous in every word and action. If Mrs. Gerrarde is not as highly polished as some women are, who, perhaps, have had a more enlarged education, she makes full amends for it by a perfect good humour, a sprightliness always entertaining, and a quickness of thought that gives her conversation an

air of something very like wit, and which I dare say passes for the thing itself with most people.