y, and so true and secret, and cherished beside, so great an
admiration for him, that he greeted him rather kindly at a moment when
another visitor would have fared scurvily enough. Puddock was painfully
struck with his pallor, his wild and haggard eye, and something stern
and brooding in his handsome face, which was altogether new and shocking
to him.

'I've been _thinking_, Puddock,' he said; 'and thought with me has grown
strangely like despair--and that's all. Why, man, _think_--what is
there for me?--all my best stakes I've lost already; and I'm fast losing
myself. How different, Sir, is my fate from others? Worse men than
I--every way incomparably worse--and d---- them, _they_ prosper, while I
go down the tide. 'Tisn't just!' And he swore a great oath. ''Tis enough
to make a man blaspheme. I've done with life--I hate it. I'll volunteer.
'Tis my first thought in the morning, and my last at night, how well I'd
like a bullet through my brain or heart. D---- the world, d---- feeling,
d---- memory. I'm not a man that can always be putting prudential
restraints upon myself. I've none of those plodding ways. The cursed
fools that spoiled me in my childhood, and forsake me now, have all to
answer for--I charge them with my ruin.' And he launched a curse at them
(meaning his aunt) which startled the plump soul of honest little
Puddock.

'You must not talk that way, Devereux,' he said, still a good deal more
dismayed by his looks than his words. 'Why are you so troubled with
vapours and blue devils?'

'Nowhy!' said Devereux, with a grim smile.

'My dear Devereux, I say, you mustn't talk in that wild way. You--you
talk like a ruined man!'

'And I so comfortable!'

'Why, to be sure, Dick, you have had some little rubs, and, maybe, your
follies and your vexations; but, hang it, you are young; you can't get
experience--at least, so I've found it--without paying for it. You
mayn't like it just now; but it's well worth the cost. Your worries and
miscarriages, dear Richard, will make you steady.'

'Steady!' echoed Devereux, like a man thinking of something far away.

'Ay, Dick--you've sown your wild oats.'

On a sudden, says the captain, 'My dear little Puddock,' and he took him
by the hand, with a sort of sarcastic flicker of a smile, and looked in
his face almost contemptuously; but his eyes and his voice softened
before the unconscious bonhomie of the true little gentleman. 'Puddock,
Puddock, did it never strike you,