adopted this boarding plan.

Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband,--he,
when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving
haberdasher within Bow bells, retired since with something under a
competence; writes himself parcel-gentleman; hath borne parish offices;
sings fine old sea-songs at threescore and ten; sighs only now and then
when he thinks that he has a son on his hands about fifteen, whom he
finds a difficulty in getting out into the world, and then checks a sigh
with muttering, as I once heard him prettily, not meaning to be heard,
"I have married my daughter, however;" takes the weather as it comes;
outsides it to town in severest season; and o' winter nights tells old
stories not tending to literature (how comfortable to author-rid
folks!), and has _one ancedote_, upon which and about forty pounds a
year he seems to have retired in green old age. It was how he was a
rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and once (not to balk his
employer's bargain) on a sweltering day in August, rode foaming into
Dunstable [1] upon a mad horse, to the dismay and expostulatory
wonderment of inn-keepers, ostlers, etc., who declared they would not
have bestrid the beast to win the Derby. Understand the creature galled
to death and desperation by gad-flies, cormorant-winged, worse than
beset Inachus's daughter. This he tells, this he brindles and burnishes,
on a winter's eve; 't is his star of set glory, his rejuvenescence to
descant upon, Far from me be it (_dá avertant!_) to look a gift-story in
the mouth, or cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the plunge of
Curtius) that the inseparate conjuncture of man and beast, the
centaur-phenomenon that staggered all Dunstable, might have been the
effect of unromantic necessity; that the horse-part carried the
reasoning willy-nilly; that needs must when such a devil drove; that
certain spiral configurations in the frame of Thomas Westwood,