midnight
The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting . Romance , however , is not a mountain made of gold , but a vein running some way through ; and it must be engineered , else either we are filled with wind from swallowing indigestible substance , or we consent to a debasing of the currency , which means her to-morrow 's bankruptcy ; and the spectacle of Romance in the bankruptcy court degrades us -LRB- who believe we are allied to her -RRB- as cruelly as it appals . It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night for an entire generation . 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 .