ly strict in exacting
a premise from every gentleman whom he admitted to his table, not to
divulge anything that occurred there--a violation of which promise was
the cause of the exclusion of Brummell. As for the Princess of Wales,
he would rather not say anything.

"And so forth. Now, in those days of my innocence, I believed these
stories as gospel, hating the fellow all the while from the bottom of
my heart, as I saw that he made a deep impression on Dosy, who sat
in open-mouthed wonder, swallowing them down as a common-councilman
swallows turtle. But times are changed. I have seen Paris and London
since, and I believe I know both villages as well as most men, and the
deuce a word of truth did Brady tell in his whole narrative. In Paris,
when not in quarters (he had joined some six or eight months after
Waterloo), he lived _au cinquantieme_ in a dog-hole in the Rue
Git-le-Coeur (a street at what I may call the Surrey side of Paris),
among carters and other such folk; and in London I discovered that his
principal domicile was in one of the courts now demolished to make room
for the fine new gimcrackery at Charing Cross; it was in Round Court,
at a pieman's of the name of Dudfield."

"Dick Dudfield?" said Jack Ginger; "I knew the man well--a most
particular friend of mine. He was a duffer besides being a pieman, and
was transported some years ago. He is now a flourishing merchant in
Australasia, and will, I suppose, in due time be grandfather to a
member of Congress."

"There it was that Brady lived then," continued Bob Burke, "when he
was hobnobbing with Georgius Quartus, and dancing at Almack's with
Lady Elizabeth Conynghame. Faith, the nearest approach he ever made
to royalty was when he was put into the King's own Bench, where he
sojourned many a long day. What an ass I was to believe a word of such
stuff! but, nevertheless, it goes down with the rustics to the present
minute. I sometimes sport a duke or so myself, when I find myself among
yokels, and I rise vastly in estimation by so doing. What do we come to
London or Paris for, but to get some touch of knowing how to do things
properly? It would be devilish hard, I think, for Ensign Brady, or
Ensign Brady's master, to do me nowadays by flamming off titles of high
life."

The company did no more than justice to Mr Burke's experience, by
unanimously admitting that such a feat was all but impossible.

"I was," he went on, "a good deal annoyed at my inferiorit