uppose
that it was on this account that Jowler married Mrs. J., a creature who
had not, I do believe, a Christian name, or a single Christian quality:
she was a hideous, bloated, yellow creature, with a beard, black teeth,
and red eyes: she was fat, lying, ugly, and stingy--she hated and was
hated by all the world, and by her jolly husband as devoutly as by any
other. She did not pass a month in the year with him, but spent most
of her time with her native friends. I wonder how she could have given
birth to so lovely a creature as her daughter. This woman was of course
with the Colonel when Julia arrived, and the spice of the devil in her
daughter's composition was most carefully nourished and fed by her. If
Julia had been a flirt before, she was a downright jilt now; she set
the whole cantonment by the ears; she made wives jealous and husbands
miserable; she caused all those duels of which I have discoursed
already, and yet such was the fascination of THE WITCH that I still
thought her an angel. I made court to the nasty mother in order to be
near the daughter; and I listened untiringly to Jowler's interminable
dull stories, because I was occupied all the time in watching the
graceful movements of Miss Julia.

But the trumpet of war was soon ringing in our ears; and on the
battle-field Gahagan is a man! The Bundelcund Invincibles received
orders to march, and Jowler, Hector-like, donned his helmet and prepared
to part from his Andromache. And now arose his perplexity: what must be
done with his daughter, his Julia? He knew his wife's peculiarities of
living, and did not much care to trust his daughter to her keeping; but
in vain he tried to find her an asylum among the respectable ladies of
his regiment. Lady Gutch offered to receive her, but would have nothing
to do with Mrs. Jowler; the surgeon's wife, Mrs. Sawbone, would have
neither mother nor daughter; there was no help for it, Julia and her
mother must have a house together, and Jowler knew that his wife would
fill it with her odious blackamoor friends.

I could not, however, go forth satisfied to the campaign until I learned
from Julia my fate. I watched twenty opportunities to see her alone,
and wandered about the Colonel's bungalow as an informer does about a
public-house, marking the incomings and the outgoings of the family, and
longing to seize the moment when Miss Jowler, unbiassed by her mother or
her papa, might listen, perhaps, to my eloquence, and mel