It now appears, that her travels had produced no effect upon her,
but that of making her more expensive and fantastic than ever:
She affected to lead the fashion, not only in point of female
dress, but in every article of taste and connoisseurship. She
made a drawing of the new facade to the house in the country; she
pulled up the trees, and pulled down the walls of the garden, so
as to let in the easterly wind, which Mr Baynard's ancestors had
been at great pains to exclude. To shew her taste in laying out
ground, she seized into her own hand a farm of two hundred acres,
about a mile from the house, which she parcelled out into walks
and shrubberies, having a great bason in the middle, into which
she poured a whole stream that turned two mills, and afforded the
best trout in the country. The bottom of the bason, however, was
so ill secured, that it would not hold the water which strained
through the earth, and made a bog of the whole plantation: in a
word, the ground which formerly payed him one hundred and fifty
pounds a year, now cost him two hundred pounds a year to keep it
in tolerable order, over and above the first expence of trees,
shrubs, flowers, turf, and gravel.
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