Mrs. Busy was married at eighteen from a boarding-school, where she had
passed her time like other young ladies, in needle-work, with a few
intervals of dancing and reading. When she became a bride she spent one
winter with her husband in town, where, having no idea of any
conversation beyond the formalities of a visit, she found nothing to
engage her passions: and when she had been one night at court, and two
at an opera, and seen the Monument, the Tombs, and the Tower, she
concluded that London had nothing more to shew, and wondered that when
women had once seen the world, they could not be content to stay at
home. She therefore went willingly to the ancient seat, and for some
years studied housewifery under Mr. Busy's mother, with so much
assiduity, that the old lady, when she died, bequeathed her a
caudle-cup, a soup-dish, two beakers, and a chest of table-linen spun
by herself.
Mr. Busy, finding the economical qualities of his lady, resigned his
affairs wholly into her hands, and devoted his life to his pointers and
his hounds. He never visited his estates but to destroy the partridges
or foxes; and often committed such devastations in the rage of pleasure,
that some of his tenants refused to hold their lands at the usual rent.
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