The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 35: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

18 THE STEAM PACKET. like love. The eldest Miss Pifpaf, whose Christian name was Ara- mintha, was about three-and-twenty at the period when this momentous history commences, She was tall—and here we may as well observe, that all the three Misses Pifpaf were tall, slim, and delicate. Ara- mintha was devotedly attached to poetry, fad lived upon Byron: indeed poetry was meat and drink to her, and might have been love also, had not Captain Pentonville cut it out in this respect. The second Miss — Pifpaf, whose Christian name was Belinda, was twenty. She was a complete romp—oh ! such a romp, that she would pass whole hours in flitting about from room to room—doing nothing at all, but laugh- ing, and leaping, and clapping her hands, and performing a thousand girlish antics. Her mother declared that she was quite a genius; but that those spirits of hers—ah! those unnatural spirits—would be the death of her! The third daughter, whose name was Sarah (‘‘a vulgar name,’ as her mother remarked, ‘‘ which her poor dear girl was com- pelled to put up with, as it was given to her in honour of old aunt Sarah, who was worth thousands,’’) was only eighteen, and boasted of having been ‘‘ finished” in Paris. Her mother lauded Sarah’s accom- plishments to the skies; and loved her more tenderly than her other children, because she imagined her to be the ill-fated victim of an ugly name. For the rest, the three Misses Pifpaf were neither very pretty, nor very ill-looking: they had all good eyes and teeth—and with those saving clauses in the constitution of the face on ira loin. These were the ladies who were assembled in the drawing-room at a quarter to five o’clock in the afternoon. Mrs. Pifpaf was lounging negligently upon the sofa, with a volume of T. K. Hervey’s poems in her hand ;—Miss Aramintha was devouring Byron in the recess of a window which commanded a view of the street, and consequently enabled her to ascertain when Captain Pentonville was coming ;—Miss Belinda was jumping off and on an ottoman placed near the sofa upon which her mamma was so languidly reclining ;—and Miss Sarah was practising a new air which she had received from Paris that morning. Mr. Pifpaf was, at the same period, busily employed in fetching up wine from the cellar—the only domestic duty which he dared to ~ execute, as a matter of course, without previously demanding his wife’s permission. ‘“‘Belinda, my sweet girl, pray have pity upon my poor head!” said Mrs. Pifpaf, in a voice which could not possibly have been more melancholy and pathetic, even if she had been going to take leave of - her family previous to being hanged at the Old Bailey. ‘‘ Don’t, my darling creature, romp about in that way—my nerves really can’t bear it. I feel that I shall go distracted—I shall indeed!” Gomicbooks. co