As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move into fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with the world, would be agreeable to him.  His project was that one of his nieces should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to reflect on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now and in the time to come.  Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite unctuously.  Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old crabbed miser?  “Tell her,” he said, “there’s fruit at stalls at every street-corner all the year through—­oysters and whelks, if she likes—­winkles, lots of pictures in shops—­a sight of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses—­bands of all sorts, and now and then we can take a walk to see the military on horseback, if she’s for soldiers.”  Indeed, he joked quite comically in speaking of the famous horse-guards—­warriors who sit on their horses to be looked at, and do not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly.  “Horse-guards blue, and horse-guards red,” he wrote—­“the blue only want boiling.”  There is reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not original in him, but it displayed his character in a fresh light.  Of course, if either of the girls was to go, Dahlia was the person.  The farmer commenced his usual process of sitting upon the idea.  That it would be policy to attach one of the family to this chirping old miser, he thought incontestable.  On the other hand, he had a dread of London, and Dahlia was surpassingly fair.  He put the case to Robert, in remembrance of what his wife had spoken, hoping that Robert would amorously stop his painful efforts to think fast enough for the occasion.  Robert, however, had nothing to say, and seemed willing to let Dahlia depart.  The only opponents to the plan were Mrs. Sumfit, a kindly, humble relative of the farmer’s, widowed out of Sussex, very loving and fat; the cook to the household, whose waist was dimly indicated by her apron-string; and, to aid her outcries, the silently-protesting Master Gammon, an old man with the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, the slowest old man of his time—­a sort of foreman of the farm before Robert had come to take matters in hand, and thrust both him and his master into the background.  Master Gammon remarked emphatically, once and for all, that “he never had much opinion of London.”  As he had never visited London, his opinion was considered the less weighty, but, as he advanced no further speech, the sins and backslidings of the metropolis were strongly brought to mind by his condemnatory utterance.  Policy and Dahlia’s entreaties at last prevailed with the farmer, and so the fair girl went up to the great city.