ho 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 slinging, and think he deserved it.'

My power of endurance had reached its limit.

'You tell me, sir, you had this brutal story from the Lord-Lieutenant of
the county?'

'Ay, from Lord Shale. But I won't have you going to him and betraying
our connection with a--'

'Halloo!' Captain Bulsted sang out to his wife on the lawn. 'And now,
squire, I have had my dose. And you will permit me to observe, that I
find it emphatically what we used to call at school black-jack.'

'And you were all the better for it afterwards, William.'

'We did not arrive at that opinion, sir. Harry, your arm. An hour with
the ladies will do us both good. The squire,' he murmured, wiping
his forehead as he went out, 'has a knack of bringing us into close
proximity with hell-fire when he pleases.'

Julia screamed on beholding us, 'Aren't you two men as pale as death!'

Janet came and looked. 'Merely a dose,' said the captain. 'We are
anxious to play battledore and shuttlecock madly.'

'So he shall, the dear!' Julia caressed him. 'We'll all have a
tournament in the wet-weather shed.'

Janet whispered to me, 'Was it--the Returning Thanks?'

'The what?' said I, with the dread at