An explosion of impulsive gratitude responded to the hint. There was a
new "saloon" just opened in Main Street,--Betty should stop there and
leave a generous order.
Well! it was some time before we were summoned to our amended dinner;
but, when we did get it, it was a dinner worth waiting for.
Sir Joseph Barley--Heaven bless him!--knew nothing of that smattering of
Cosmos into which we hungry New-Englanders are wont to thrust our wits.
He bluntly declared that he had never heard of Detached Vitalized
Electricity, Woman's Rights, or Harmonial Development; also, he was
delightfully confident that--he, Sir Joseph Barley, British subject,
_not_ having heard of them--they could not, by any possibility, be worth
hearing about. Moreover, he had not read a word of Carlyle, and
positively did not know of the existence of any English poet called
Browning. Dr. Burge, he thoughtfully suggested, had probably mistaken
the name; it was Byron, or possibly Bulwer, about whom he wished to
inquire. The former of these personages was a British Peer, and a writer
of some celebrity; he was, however, no longer living, having never
recovered from a fever he took at a place called Missolonghi, in
Greece;--the latter had written a book entitled "Pelham," once popular,
but now thought inferior to a series of romances known in Great Britain
as the "Waverley Novels"; these were the work of one Scott, a native of
Edinburgh, whom George IV.
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