Surely the Countess of Fleetwood's drive from the Welsh borders to
Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats
of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of her
progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing of surprises
and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight, windings of a horn
over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of the child, the
pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of heroine
performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry in a waste
country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again: 'There's a
farm I see for milk for him!' the Dame repeats, having begun with an
admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not produced on
authority. The end in design is to win the ear by making a fuss, and
roll event upon event for the braining of common intelligence, until her
narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.

Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.
There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer
breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as she
clasped it or was in the room with it. Walking behind the precious
donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful
name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she 'was not black to see, nor
old. No, she was very young. But she did all the things that soldiers
do,--was a bit of a foreigner;--she brought a reputation up from the
Welsh land, and it had a raven's croak and a glow-worm's drapery and a
goblin's origin.

Something was hinted of her having agitated London once. Somebody
dropped word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge. She
stalked park and country at night. Stories, one or two near the truth,