the streets and soiled yours?'

I remarked that I was sensible of the debt of gratitude I owed to him,
but would rather submit to the scourge, or to destitution, than listen to
these attacks on my father.

'Cut yourself loose, Harry,' he cried, a trifle mollified. 'Don't season
his stew--d' ye hear? Stick to decent people. Why, you don't expect he'll
be locked up in the Tower for a finish, eh? It'll be Newgate, or the
Bench. He and his Dauphin--ha! ha! A rascal crow and a Jack Dauphin!'

Captain Bulsted reached me his hand. 'You have a great deal to bear,
Harry. I commend you, my boy, for taking it manfully.'

'I say no more,' quoth the squire. 'But what I said was true. The fellow
gives his little dinners and suppers to his marchionesses, countesses,
duchesses, and plays clown and pantaloon among the men. He thinks a
parcel o' broidered petticoats 'll float him. So they may till a
tradesman sent stark mad pops a pin into him. Harry, I'd as lief hang on
to a fire-ship. Here's Ilchester tells me . . . and Ilchester speaks of
him under his breath now as if he were sitting in a pew funking the
parson. Confound the fellow! I say he's guilty of treason. Pooh! who
cares! He cuts out the dandies of his day, does he? He's past sixty, if
he's a month. It's all damned harlequinade. Let him twirl off one
columbine or another, or a dozen, and then--the last of him! Fellow makes
the world look like a farce. He 's got about eight feet by five to caper
on, and all London gaping at him--geese! Are you a gentleman and a man of
sense, Harry Richmond, to let yourself be lugged about in public--by the
Lord! like a pair of street-tumblers in spangled haunch-bags, father and
boy, on a patch of carpet, and a drum banging, and tossed and turned
inside out, and my God! the ass of a fellow strutting the ring with you
on his shoulder! That's the spectacle. And you, Harry, now I 'll ask you,
do you mean your wife--egad, it'd be a pretty scene, with your princess
in hip-up petticoats, stiff as bottle-funnel top down'ards, airing a
whole leg, and knuckling a tambourine!'

'Not crying, my dear lad?' Captain Bulsted put his arm round me kindly,
and tried to catch a glimpse of my face. I let him see I was not going
through that process. 'Whew!' said he, 'and enough to make any Christian
sweat! You're in a bath, Harry. I wouldn't expect the man who murdered
his godmother for one shilling and fivepence three-farthings the other
day, to take such a sl