My father, as anybody may naturally imagine, came down with my mother into the country, in but a pettish kind of a humour. The first twenty or five-and-twenty miles he did nothing in the world but fret and tease himself, and indeed my mother too, about the cursed expense, which he said might every shilling of it have been saved;—then what vexed him more than everything else was, the provoking time of the year,—which, as I told you, was towards the end of September , when his wall-fruit and green gages especially, in which he was very curious, were just ready for pulling:⸺“Had he been whistled up to London , upon a Tom Fool’s errand, in any other month of the whole year, he should not have said three words about it.”
For the next two whole stages, no subject would go down, but the heavy blow he had sustain’d from the loss of a son, whom it seems he had fully reckon’d upon in his mind, and register’d down in his pocketbook, as a second staff for his old age, in case Bobby should fail him. The disappointment of this, he said, was ten times more to a wise man, than all the money which the journey, etc. , had cost him, put together,—rot the hundred and twenty pounds,⸺he did not mind it a rush.
From Stilton , all the way to Grantham , nothing in the whole affair provoked him so much as the condolences of his friends, and the foolish figure they should both make at church, the first Sunday ;⸺of which, in the satirical vehemence of his wit, now sharpen’d a little by vexation, he would give so many humorous and provoking descriptions,—and place his rib and self in so many tormenting lights and attitudes in the face of the whole congregation;—that my mother declared, these two stages were so truly tragicomical, that she did nothing but laugh and cry in a breath, from one end to the other of them all the way.