and
bussing his friends--but the other stepped back with a flush on his pale
face, seeming to decline this public manifestation of Steele's regard.

"My dearest Joe, where hast thou hidden thyself this age?" cries the
captain, still holding both his friend's hands; "I have been languishing
for thee this fortnight."

"A fortnight is not an age, Dick," says the other, very good-humouredly.
(He had light blue eyes, extraordinary bright, and a face perfectly
regular and handsome, like a tinted statue.) "And I have been hiding
myself--where do you think?"

"What! not across the water, my dear Joe?" says Steele, with a look of
great alarm: "thou knowest I have always----"

"No," says his friend, interrupting him with a smile: "we are not come to
such straits as that, Dick. I have been hiding, sir, at a place where
people never think of finding you--at my own lodgings, whither I am going
to smoke a pipe now and drink a glass of sack; will your honour come?"

"Harry Esmond, come hither," cries out Dick. "Thou hast heard me talk over
and over again at my dearest Joe, my guardian angel."

"Indeed," says Mr. Esmond, with a bow, "it is not from you only that I
have learnt to admire Mr. Addison. We loved good poetry at Cambridge, as
well as at Oxford; and I have some of yours by heart, though I have put on
a red-coat ... '_O qui canoro blandius Orpheo vocale ducis carmen_'; shall
I go on, sir?" says Mr. Esmond, who indeed had read and loved the charming
Latin poems of Mr. Addison, as every scholar of that time knew and admired
them.

"This is Captain Esmond who was at Blenheim," says Steele.

"Lieutenant Esmond," says the other, with a low bow; "at Mr. Addison's
service."

"I have heard of you," says Mr. Addison, with a smile; as, indeed,
everybody about town had heard that unlucky story about Esmond's dowager
aunt and the duchess.

"We were going to the 'George', to take a bottle before the play," says
Steele; "wilt thou be one, Joe?"

Mr. Addison said his own lodgings were hard by, where he was still rich
enough to give a good bottle of wine to his friends; and invited the two
gentlemen to his apartment in the Haymarket, whither we accordingly went.

"I shall get credit with my landlady," says he, with a smile, "when she
sees two such fine gentlemen as you come up my stair." And he politely
made his visitors welcome to his apartment, which was indeed but a shabby
one, though no grandee of the land could receive his