k desperation, which followed her announcement of this step
to him. For Mr. Brock, she repelled his offer with scorn and loathing,
and treated the notion of a union with Mr. Bullock with yet fiercer
contempt. Marry him indeed! a workhouse pauper carrying a brown-bess!
She would have died sooner, she said, or robbed on the highway. And so,
to do her justice, she would: for the little minx was one of the vainest
creatures in existence, and vanity (as I presume everybody knows)
becomes THE principle in certain women's hearts--their moral spectacles,
their conscience, their meat and drink, their only rule of right and
wrong.

As for Mr. Tummas, he, as we have seen, was quite unfriendly to the
proposition as she could be; and the Corporal, with a good deal of
comical gravity, vowed that, as he could not be satisfied in his
dearest wishes, he would take to drinking for a consolation: which he
straightway did.

"Come, Tummas," said he to Mr. Bullock "since we CAN'T have the girl
of our hearts, why, hang it, Tummas, let's drink her health!" To which
Bullock had no objection. And so strongly did the disappointment weigh
upon honest Corporal Brock, that even when, after unheard-of quantities
of beer, he could scarcely utter a word, he was seen absolutely to weep,
and, in accents almost unintelligible, to curse his confounded ill-luck
at being deprived, not of a wife, but of a child: he wanted one so, he
said, to comfort him in his old age.

The time of Mrs. Catherine's couche drew near, arrived, and was gone
through safely. She presented to the world a chopping boy, who might
use, if he liked, the Galgenstein arms with a bar-sinister; and in
her new cares and duties had not so many opportunities as usual of
quarrelling with the Count: who, perhaps, respected her situation, or,
at least, was so properly aware of the necessity of quiet to her, that
he absented himself from home morning, noon, and night.

The Captain had, it must be confessed, turned these continued absences
to a considerable worldly profit, for he played incessantly; and, since
his first victory over the Warwickshire Squire, Fortune had been so
favourable to him, that he had at various intervals amassed a sum of
nearly a thousand pounds, which he used to bring home as he won; and
which he deposited in a strong iron chest, cunningly screwed down by
himself under his own bed. This Mrs. Catherine regularly made, and the
treasure underneath it could be no secret to