’Indeed, I don’t pretend to be a connoisseur or conoscenti myself; but I’m told the style is undeniably modern.  And was not I lucky, Juliana, not to let that MEDONA be knocked down to me?  I was just going to bid, when I heard such smart bidding; but fortunately the auctioneer let out that it was done by a very old master—­a hundred years old.  Oh! your most obedient, thinks I!—­if that’s the case, it’s not for my money; so I bought this, in lieu of the smoke-dried thing, and had it a bargain.’

In architecture, Mrs. Rafferty had as good a taste and as much skill as in painting.  There had been a handsome portico in front of the house; but this interfering with the lady’s desire to have a veranda, which she said could not be dispensed with, she had raised the whole portico to the second story, where it stood, or seemed to stand, upon a tarpaulin roof.  But Mrs. Raffarty explained that the pillars, though they looked so properly substantial, were really hollow and as light as feathers, and were supported with cramps, without disobliging the front wall of the house at all to signify.

‘Before she showed the company any farther,’ she said, ’she must premise to his lordship, that she had been originally stinted in room for her improvements, so that she could not follow her genius liberally; she had been reduced to have some things on a confined scale, and occasionally to consult her pocket-compass; but she prided herself upon having put as much into a light pattern as could well be; that had been her whole ambition, study, and problem, for she was determined to have at least the honour of having a little taste of everything at Tusculum.’

So she led the way to a little conservatory, and a little pinery, and a little grapery, and a little aviary, and a little pheasantry, and a little dairy for show, and a little cottage for ditto, with a grotto full of shells, and a little hermitage full of earwigs, and a little ruin full of looking-glass, ’to enlarge and multiply the effect of the Gothic.’  ’But you could only put your head in, because it was just fresh painted, and though there had been a fire ordered in the ruin all night, it had only smoked.’

In all Mrs. Raffarty’s buildings, whether ancient or modern, there was a studied crookedness.

‘Yes,’ she said, ’she hated everything straight, it was so formal and unpicturesque.  Uniformity and conformity, she observed, had their day; but now, thank the stars of the present day, irregularity and difformity bear the bell, and have the majority.’

As they proceeded and walked through the grounds, from which Mrs. Raffarty, though she had done her best, could not take that which nature had given, she pointed out to my lord ‘a happy moving termination,’ consisting of a Chinese bridge, with a fisherman leaning over the rails.  On a sudden, the fisherman was seen to tumble over the bridge into the water.

The gentlemen ran to extricate the poor fellow, while they heard Mrs. Raffarty bawling to his lordship, to beg he would never mind, and not trouble himself.