, or burnt out by the fire, of evil
angry fortune. His tail-coat safe, the youthful Briton is always ready
for any change in the mind of the moody Goddess. And it is an almost
certain thing that, presuming her to have a damsel of condition in view
for him as a compensation for the slaps he has received, he must lose
her, he cannot enter a mutual path with her, if he shall have failed to
retain this article of a black tail, his social passport. I mean of
course that he retain respect for the article in question. Respect for it
firmly seated in his mind, the tail may be said to be always handy. It is
fortune's uniform in Britain: the candlestick, if I may dare to say so,
to the candle; nor need any young islander despair of getting to himself
her best gifts, while he has her uniform at command, as glossy as may be.

The ladies of Brookfield were really stormed by Mr. Barrett's elegant
tail. When, the first glass of wine nodded over, Mr. Pole continued the
discourse of the morning, with allusions to French cooks, and his cook,
their sympathies were taken captive by Mr. Barrett's tact: the door to
their sympathies having been opened to him as it were by his attire. They
could not guess what necessity urged Mr. Pole to assert his locked-up
self so vehemently; but it certainly made the stranger shine with a
beautiful mild lustre. Their spirits partly succumbed to him by a process
too lengthened to explain here. Indeed, I dare do no more than hint at
these mysteries of feminine emotion. I beg you to believe that when we
are dealing with that wonder, the human heart female, the part played by
a tail-coat and a composed demeanour is not insignificant. No doubt the
ladies of Brookfield would have rebutted the idea of a tail-coat
influencing them in any way as monstrous. But why was it, when Mr. Pole
again harped on his cook, in almost similar words, that they were drawn
to meet the eyes of the stranger, on whom they printed one of the most
fabulously faint fleeting looks imaginable, with a proportionately big
meaning for him that might read it? It must have been that this uniform
of a tail had laid a basis of equality for the hour, otherwise they never
would have done so; nor would he have enjoyed the chance of showing them
that he could respond to the remotest mystic indications, with a muffled
adroitness equal to their own, and so encouraged them to commence a
language leading to intimacy with a rapidity that may well appear magi