With great deference to the old lady’s judgment on these matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable.  When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin Bridget—­Bridget Elia.

I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a toothache, or a sprained ancle,—­when you are subdued and humble,—­you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action.

There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist.—­

I grant it is not the highest style of man—­I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battle—­she lives not, alas! to whom I should apologise.—­

At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come in as something admissible.—­I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing.  I am subdued to an inferior interest.  Those shadows of winning amuse me.

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)—­(dare I tell thee, how foolish I am?)—­I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play:  I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever.  The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over:  and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble.  Bridget and I should be ever playing.

A CHAPTER ON EARS

I have no ear.—­

Mistake me not, reader,—­nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital.  Better my mother had never borne me.—­I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—­those indispensable side-intelligencers.

Neither have I incurred, or done any thing to incur, with Defoe, that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance—­to feel “quite unabashed,” and at ease upon that article.  I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be.

When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean—­for music.—­To say that this heart never melted at the concourse of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel.—­“Water parted from the sea” never fails to move it strangely.  So does “In Infancy.”  But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman—­the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation—­the sweetest—­why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S——­, once the blooming Fanny Weatheral of the Temple—­who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow, tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing sentiment, which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W——­n.