dinner parties, with so many able and willing coadjutors?—and nothing could show off to better advantage than his beautiful, modest wife, and four or five of her neat, happy sisters, scattered about the dinner table.
"What was it," you ask, "that Fanny did not know?" All that she knew I have told you already, gentle reader. Do you think that she ever so much as dreamed that the earth moved around the sun?—that mahogany was once a tree?—that the carpet came from a sheep's back?—that her bobbinet lace came from a cotton pod?—As to her silk dress, could it be supposed that her imagination ever ran riot so far as to believe that little worms spun the web? Does any one think for a moment, that she knew that quills were plucked from the wing of a goose?—that paper came from old rags?—that a looking-glass was ever any thing but the smooth, polished thing it now is? She saw loads of hay pass, and knew that horses were fed with it; but she never speculated on the manner in which it became hay. It is a chance if she knew that it was once grass. Not that Fanny had never read all this, when very young, in her little books; but she read without letting any thing make an impression. Nothing was a mystery to her; she never made a doubt of any thing; but took things and left them just as she found them, either in books or in conversation.
Once her husband said, "I wonder whether they pull the feathers from the tail of the ostrich while he is alive?" "Would it hurt him if they did?" said Fanny. "Yes, I presume it would," replied he. "Then they wait till the poor thing dies," quoth she—"only look, dear husband, see that merry little group of children, all boys too; how my father would rejoice if they were all his sons."
You will ask whether Fanny ever took a walk.
