Born in the north of Ireland, the child of a Scottish-Ulster mother and
a Connaught father, she had ingeniously contrived to combine in her own
person the vices of two distinct races, and exclude the virtues of both.
Her accent was the most fearful which could be imagined. She had the
brogue of the West grafted on the accent of the North. And yet there
was a variety about her even in this respect. One never could tell,
from visit to visit, whether she proposed to pronounce "written" as
"wrutten" or "wretten";[Footnote: The wife of a celebrated Indian
officer stated that she once, in the north of Ireland, heard Job's
utterance thus rendered--"Oh! that my words were wr_u_tten, that they
were pr_e_nted in a b_u_ke."] whether she would elect to style her
parents, to whom she made frequent reference, her "pawpaw and mawmaw,"
or her "pepai and memai."
It all depended with whom Miss Blake had lately been most intimate. If
she had been "hand and glove" with a "nob" from her own country--she was
in no way reticent about thus styling her grander acquaintances, only
she wrote the word "knob"--who thought to conceal his nationality by
"awing" and "hawing," she spoke about people being "morried" and wearing
"sockcloth and oshes." If, on the contrary, she had been thrown into the
society of a lady who so far honoured England as to talk as some people
do in England, we had every A turned into E, and every U into O, while
she minced her words as if she had been saying "niminy piminy" since she
first began to talk, and honestly believed no human being could ever
have told she had been born west of St.
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