CORRESPONDENCE, 1831-36. 79 



I went to stay with a clerical friend, 1 who lives six miles from 1834. 

 any town or village, except the thing he calls his parish, and a 

 lone house he calls his rectory. So, he having no vehicle except 

 a four-legged apparatus called a pony, we slung my baggage 

 across the beast, and crossed the country on foot like a gipsy 

 migration, talking Mathematics over his head to his very great 

 edification. Indeed he, the quadruped, looked as wise and pro- 

 fited as much as some of my preceding pupils have done. How 

 people live in such lone houses I know not. Conceive me 

 reduced to clip hedges to pass away the time till dinner, which 

 1 did with great gout, seeing that it is reducing trees to some- 

 thing like regularity, and diminishing the sum-total of foliage. 

 From thence I went to Oxford, where I was thrown upon my 

 resources for a whole evening. The only incident worth notice 

 was that, having strolled out and picked up some second-hand 

 books at a book-stall, rather Cornelius Agrippa looking sort of 

 things, a good-looking old gentleman (a stout Church and State 

 man, I'll swear) was so astourded that he changed his table to 

 increase his distance, and looked at me as if he expected to see 

 me carried away by an Avatar of the evil principle. Thence got 

 I to Bedford, where I stayed some days with Captain Smyth, 

 heard all the town politics, saw a jail with two men in it, father 

 and son, charged with cutting the tails off fifteen pigs, dined 

 with aclericus, and did various other things, not forgetting seeing 

 a play acted by little children. Captain Smyth's observatory 

 is the most beautiful little thing imaginable, mounting a 5-foot 

 transit, a 3-foot circle (belonging to our Society), and an 8-foot 

 equatorial. We had no very fine night, so that I could not know 

 all the merits of the latter ; but judging from what I saw, it 

 must be a very capital instrument of its kind. Thence got I to 

 Cambridge inside a coach with a lady, whose history I wormed 

 out of her, agreeably to a talent I have for doing those things 

 when I like, which you will admit when I tell you that in a ride 

 of twenty-five miles I ascertained , that she had married when 

 very young an officer of 1st Light Dragoons, with him had gone 

 to India, was stationed at Bangalore, where she travelled ; how 

 he died, she came home, and married the vicar of some place 

 which I now forget ; and, having stayed at some place, which I 

 equally forget, was now moving, with furniture following in a 

 waggon, and husband deposited outside the coach, to take pos- 

 session of his living, first stopping to dine with a friend, whose 

 1 Rev. Arthur Neate. 



