drink that toast, and
how I used to think every woman was an angel.'

'Was that before you were married?' mildly inquired Mr. Watkins Tottle.

'Oh! certainly,' replied Mr. Gabriel Parsons. 'I have never thought so
since; and a precious milksop I must have been, ever to have thought so
at all. But, you know, I married Fanny under the oddest, and most
ridiculous circumstances possible.'

'What were they, if one may inquire?' asked Timson, who had heard the
story, on an average, twice a week for the last six months. Mr. Watkins
Tottle listened attentively, in the hope of picking up some suggestion
that might be useful to him in his new undertaking.

'I spent my wedding-night in a back-kitchen chimney,' said Parsons, by
way of a beginning.

'In a back-kitchen chimney!' ejaculated Watkins Tottle. 'How dreadful!'

'Yes, it wasn't very pleasant,' replied the small host. 'The fact is,
Fanny's father and mother liked me well enough as an individual, but had
a decided objection to my becoming a husband. You see, I hadn't any
money in those days, and they had; and so they wanted Fanny to pick up
somebody else. However, we managed to discover the state of each other's
affections somehow. I used to meet her, at some mutual friends' parties;
at first we danced together, and talked, and flirted, and all that sort
of thing; then, I used to like nothing so well as sitting by her side--we
didn't talk so much then, but I remember I used to have a great notion of
looking at her out of the extreme corner of my left eye--and then I got
very miserable and sentimental, and began to write verses, and use
Macassar oil. At last I couldn't bear it any longer, and after I had
walked up and down the sunny side of Oxford-street in tight boots for a
week--and a devilish hot summer it was too--in the hope of meeting her, I
sat down and wrote a letter, and begged her to manage to see me
clandestinely, for I wanted to hear her decision from her own mouth. I
said I had discovered, to my perfect satisfaction, that I couldn't live
without her, and that if she didn't have me, I had made up my mind to
take prussic acid, or take to drinking, or emigrate, so as to take myself
off in some way or other. Well, I borrowed a pound, and bribed the
housemaid to give her the note, which she did.'

'And what was the reply?' inquired Timson, who had found, before, that to
encourage the repetition of old stories is to get a general invitation.

'Oh, the