previous next
‘ [96] man, dear child! Her question, Do horses sit up late?’

Before taking leave of us he invited us to take tea with him on the following Sunday. When the day arrived, my husband was kept at home by a severe headache, but Mr.Mann and Mrs. Mann, my sister, and myself drove out to Chelsea, where Mr. Carlyle resided at that time. In receiving us he apologized for his wife, who was also suffering from headache and could not appear.

In her absence I was requested to pour tea. Our host partook of it copiously, in all the strength of the teapot. As I filled and refilled his cup, I thought that his chronic dyspepsia was not to be wondered at. The repast was a simple one. It consisted of a plate of toast and two small dishes of stewed fruit, which he offered us with the words, ‘Perhaps ye can eat some of this. I never eat these things myself.’

The conversation was mostly a monologue. Mr. Carlyle spoke with a strong Scotch accent, and his talk sounded to me like pages of his writings. He had recently been annoyed by some movement tending to the disestablishment of the Scottish Church. Apropos of this he said, ‘That auld Kirk of Scotland! To think that a man like Johnny Graham should be able to wipe it out with a flirt of his pen!’ Charles Sumner was spoken of, and Mr. Carlyle said, ‘Oh yes; Mr. Sumner

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Scotland (United Kingdom) (1)
Chelsea (Massachusetts, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Thomas Carlyle (3)
Charles Sumner (2)
Horace Mann (2)
Kirk (1)
Johnny Graham (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: