during the holidays, and is requested by his papa to quit the
dinner-table when the ladies retire from it.

Corbleu! I recollect their whole talk as well as if it had been
whispered but yesterday; and can see, after a long dinner, the yellow
summer sun throwing long shadows over the lawn before the dining-room
windows, and my poor mother and her company of ladies sailing away to
the music-room in old Boodle Hall. The Countess Dawdley was the great
lady in our county, a portly lady who used to love crimson satin in
those days, and birds-of-paradise. She was flaxen-haired, and the Regent
once said she resembled one of King Charles's beauties.

When Sir John Todcaster used to begin his famous story of the exciseman
(I shall not tell it here, for very good reasons), my poor mother
used to turn to Lady Dawdley, and give that mystic signal at which all
females rise from their chairs. Tufthunt, the curate, would spring
from his seat, and be sure to be the first to open the door for the
retreating ladies; and my brother Tom and I, though remaining stoutly in
our places, were speedily ejected from them by the governor's invariable
remark, "Tom and George, if you have had QUITE enough of wine, you had
better go and join your mamma." Yonder she marches, heaven bless her!
through the old oak hall (how long the shadows of the antlers are on the
wainscot, and the armor of Rollo Fitz-Boodle looks in the sunset as if
it were emblazoned with rubies)--yonder she marches, stately and tall,
in her invariable pearl-colored tabbinet, followed by Lady Dawdley,
blazing like a flamingo; next comes Lady Emily Tufthunt (she was Lady
Emily Flintskinner), who will not for all the world take precedence of
rich, vulgar, kind, good-humored Mrs. COLONEL Grogwater, as she would be
called, with a yellow little husband from Madras, who first taught me
to drink sangaree. He was a new arrival in our county, but paid nobly to
the hounds, and occupied hospitably a house which was always famous
for its hospitality--Sievely Hall (poor Bob Cullender ran through seven
thousand a year before he was thirty years old). Once when I was a
lad, Colonel Grogwater gave me two gold mohurs out of his desk for
whist-markers, and I'm sorry to say I ran up from Eton and sold them
both for seventy-three shillings at a shop in Cornhill. But to return
to the ladies, who are all this while kept waiting in the hall, and to
their usual conversation after dinner.

Can any man for