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Mrs. Jordan.—­Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the consequences of too much restraint in ill-educated country girls, in romps, in hoydens, and in wards on whom the mercenary have designs.  She wore a bib and tucker, and pinafore, with a bouncing propriety, fit to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the idea of bringing such a household responsibility on his shoulders.  To see her when thus attired, shed blubbering tears for some disappointment, and eat all the while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping, and moaning, and munching, and eyeing at very bite the part she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite worth a hundred sermons, and no one could produce such an impression in favor of amiableness as she did, when she acted in gentle, generous, and confiding character.  The way in which she would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up a quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good humor, or sing (without accompaniment) the song of, “Since then I’m doom’d,” or “In the dead of the night,” trusting, as she had a right to do, and as the house wished her to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and loving voice—­the reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret come into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified whatsoever was happy at that period of life, and which has gone like herself.  The very sound of the familiar word ‘bud’ from her lips (the abbreviation of husband,) as she packed it closer, as it were, in the utterance, and pouted it up with fondness in the man’s face, taking him at the same time by the chin, was a whole concentrated world of the power of loving.

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Residence at Chelsea.—­Remoteness in nearness.—­From the noise and dust of the New Road, my family removed to a corner in Chelsea where the air of the neighboring river was so refreshing, and the quiet of the “no-thoroughfare” so full of repose, that, although our fortunes were at their worst, and my health almost of a piece with them, I felt for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in the silence.  I got to like the very cries in the street for making me the more aware of it for the contrast.  I fancied they were unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which procured them the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and others.  Nor is this unlikely, when it is considered how fond those masters were of sporting with their art, and setting the most trivial words to music in their glees and catches.  The primitive cries of cowslips, primroses, and hot cross buns, seemed never to have quitted this sequestered region.  They were like daisies in a bit of surviving field.  There was an old seller of fish in particular, whose cry of “Shrimps as large as prawns,” was such