“What would your ladyship have me to do?” he once said to my Lady Ludlow, when she wished him to go and see a poor man who had broken his leg.  “I cannot piece the leg as the doctor can; I cannot nurse him as well as his wife does; I may talk to him, but he no more understands me than I do the language of the alchemists.  My coming puts him out; he stiffens himself into an uncomfortable posture, out of respect to the cloth, and dare not take the comfort of kicking, and swearing, and scolding his wife, while I am there.  I hear him, with my figurative ears, my lady, heave a sigh of relief when my back is turned, and the sermon that he thinks I ought to have kept for the pulpit, and have delivered to his neighbours (whose case, as he fancies, it would just have fitted, as it seemed to him to be addressed to the sinful), is all ended, and done, for the day.  I judge others as myself; I do to them as I would be done to.  That’s Christianity, at any rate.  I should hate—­saving your ladyship’s presence—­to have my Lord Ludlow coming and seeing me, if I were ill.  ’Twould be a great honour, no doubt; but I should have to put on a clean nightcap for the occasion; and sham patience, in order to be polite, and not weary his lordship with my complaints.  I should be twice as thankful to him if he would send me game, or a good fat haunch, to bring me up to that pitch of health and strength one ought to be in, to appreciate the honour of a visit from a nobleman.  So I shall send Jerry Butler a good dinner every day till he is strong again; and spare the poor old fellow my presence and advice.”

My lady would be puzzled by this, and by many other of Mr. Mountford’s speeches.  But he had been appointed by my lord, and she could not question her dead husband’s wisdom; and she knew that the dinners were always sent, and often a guinea or two to help to pay the doctor’s bills; and Mr. Mountford was true blue, as we call it, to the back-bone; hated the dissenters and the French; and could hardly drink a dish of tea without giving out the toast of “Church and King, and down with the Rump.”  Moreover, he had once had the honour of preaching before the King and Queen, and two of the Princesses, at Weymouth; and the King had applauded his sermon audibly with,—­“Very good; very good;” and that was a seal put upon his merit in my lady’s eyes.

Besides, in the long winter Sunday evenings, he would come up to the Court, and read a sermon to us girls, and play a game of picquet with my lady afterwards; which served to shorten the tedium of the time.  My lady would, on those occasions, invite him to sup with her on the dais; but as her meal was invariably bread and milk only, Mr. Mountford preferred sitting down amongst us, and made a joke about its being wicked and heterodox to eat meagre on Sunday, a festival of the Church.  We smiled at this joke just as much the twentieth time we heard it as we did at the first; for we knew it was coming, because he always coughed a little nervously before he made a joke, for fear my lady should not approve:  and neither she nor he seemed to remember that he had ever hit upon the idea before.