Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/21

 Rh accents, she felt herself to be most irresistible.

There is really, as Thackeray well knew, a great deal of pleasing information to be gathered from the "Familiar Letters," and no pedagogic pride, no spirit of carping criticism, mars their delightful flavor. The more wonderful the tale, the more serene the composure with which it is narrated. Howell sees in Holland a church monument "where an earl and a lady are engraven, with three hundred and sixty-five children about them, which were all delivered at one birth." Nay, more, he sees "the two basins in which they were christened, and the bishop's name who did it, not yet two hundred years ago;" so what reasonable room is left for doubt? He tells us the well-authenticated story of the bird with a white breast which visited every member of the Oxenham family immediately before death; and also the "choice history" of Captain Concy, who, dying in Hungary, sent his heart back to France, as a gift to his own true love. She, however, had been forced by her father into a reluctant and unhappy marriage; and her husband, intercepting the token, had it