Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/200

188 I bade her adieu with regret, for I never had the good fortune to meet with so perfect a relic of a well-spent life. The spirit within was as warm and cheerful as if the blood of eighteen instead of eighty coursed in her veins. She is indeed a woman who has lived to good purpose.

(The writer of this pleasant letter is rather provoking as to dates, for Percy was acted in 1778, and fifty-two years from that time would be 1830, when Hannah was eighty-five, instead of seventy-seven, and was no longer at Wrington.)

Some of the younger generation who were brought to the shrine at Barley Wood thought the style of conversation too complimentary, but the old lady herself belonged to an age when such forms of speech were thought ordinary civility; she herself was regarded with deep veneration; and humble-minded as she really was, such expressions seemed to her like mere courtesy. Playful she always was, and in the March of 1826 she extemporised the following "heroic poem," as she was pleased to call it, on seeing the carcase of a pig dragged home for dissection:—

The saddest sight that ere was seen Was Piggy rolling up the green; Though dragged, he still would roll alone Downward like Sisyphus's stone. This pig, as good as e'er was sold, Was worth, not quite, his weight in gold.