at villanous inn, by the
report of the post-boys who had taken Miss Trevanion's carriage there,
and met you on the road. On reaching the inn I found two fellows
conferring outside the door. They sprang in as we drove up, but not
before my servant Summers--a quick fellow, you know, who has travelled
with me from Norway to Nubia--had quitted his seat and got into the
house, into which I followed him with a step, you dog, as active as your
own! Egad! I was twenty-one then! Two fellows had already knocked
down poor Summers, and showed plenty of fight. Do you know," said
the marquis, interrupting himself with an air of serio-comic
humiliation--"do you know that I actually--no, you never will believe
it; mind, 't is a secret--actually broke my cane over one fellows
shoulders? Look!" (and the marquis held up the fragment of the lamented
weapon). "And I half suspect, but I can't say positively, that I
had even the necessity to demean myself by a blow with the naked
hand,--clenched too! Quite Eton again; upon my honor it was! Ha, ha!"

And the marquis--whose magnificent proportions, in the full vigor of
man's strongest, if not his most combative, age, would have made him a
formidable antagonist even to a couple of prize-fighters, supposing he
had retained a little of Eton skill in such encounters--laughed with the
glee of a schoolboy, whether at the thought of his prowess; or his sense
of the contrast between so rude a recourse to primitive warfare, and his
own indolent habits and almost feminine good temper. Composing himself,
however, with the quick recollection how little I could share his
hilarity, he resumed gravely, "It took us some time, I don't say
to defeat our foes, but to bind them, which I thought a necessary
precaution; one fellow, Trevanion's servant, all the while stunning me
with quotations from Shakspeare. I then gently laid hold of a gown, the
bearer of which had been long trying to scratch me, but being, luckily,
a small woman, had not succeeded in reaching to my eyes. But the gown
escaped, and fluttered off to the kitchen. I followed, and there I found
Miss Trevanion's Jezebel of a maid. She was terribly frightened, and
affected to be extremely penitent. I own to you that I don't care what
a man says in the way of slander, but a woman's tongue against another
woman,--especially if that tongue be in the mouth of a lady's lady,--I
think it always worth silencing; I therefore consented to pardon this
woman on co