Sir Francis Head, in a passage which we purposely omit because we want to have our own say, in our own way, on the subject, informs us that by 1849 four of the young ladies had managed to make excellent marriages. Sir Francis has greatly understated the number. It is quite true that the daily occupations of the young ladies, even without drawing the corks of beer bottles, were arduous and unceasing. Nevertheless, as with all busily occupied people, a time can be found for everything. Not four, but four times four of them found sixteen eligible husbands, and at the present time we know two of them, one not fat, but “fair and forty,” the other with slight disadvantage in point of age—forty-four (she confesses to forty[80])—but in every other respect at least as eligible, who have had each to exhibit the sable signs of sorrow, void, and bereavement, within the last eighteen months. Let us just pause for a moment, to shed a “pensive tear” to the memory of the two dear departed, just as in the days of our boyhood our sympathies were requested in memory of the celebrated bonnie lassie of “Kelvin Grove,” by the father of a lady of present times, who is worshipped by millions, and has been possessed of only by four. (May he of the strong shield endure for ever!) Our tear is shed; and now, like the military bands that accompany the remains of a departed comrade to the grave with the _Dead March in Saul_, and return to barracks with joyous and festive music, do we proclaim, by sound of wedding trumpet and cornet-à-piston, the probability that, ere long, each of the charming widows will make a second matrimonial venture. We can, in fact, go one step farther. One of the ladies has already purchased the grey silk dress, absolutely necessary on such occasion; the second has not gone so far as actual purchase, but she knows where to put her hand upon one at a moment’s notice. The dress-maker has already been consulted about the trimmings.[81]
It may probably be observed by any person who has been so venturous as to read the first hundred or so of our pages, that we are given to statistics. This is so, and it has also been alleged of us that we readily detect errors in them when prepared by others. Without taking to ourselves more than a decorous quantity of flattering unction, we believe we shall be able to show, in a work preparing for early publication, that, as regards Post Office statistics, at all events, none have been issued by the department for the last fifteen years that are not abounding in most egregious blunders, and that the logical dogmas of “contrariety, sub-contrariety, and contradiction” were never carried to greater extent than in these documents. Our statistics and contradictions are, at the present moment, however, of a different character. They refer to what, in the palmy days of Wolverton as a seat of learning and refreshment, formed an important part of the population of the colony; at least they are described as so being, both in an article of the _Quarterly Review_ upon the London and North-Western Railway of 1849, and in Sir Francis Head’s “Stokers and Pokers,” published in the identical same year, and almost in the identical same month. Nevertheless the former names seventy-five pigs and piglings as members of the refreshment establishment; but Sir Francis disputes the figures, raises it ten higher, and not only insists that they were eighty-five in number, but that each was converted, in his or her turn every year, into pork pies and sausage roly-polies. But whichever amount be the correct one, let the pork pies and sausage roly-polies rest in peace. The indigestions of which they were, in their day, the _teterimæ causæ_, have long since passed away. Let no rude attempt be made to re-produce them.