his means.)

Miss Haythorn. Eh! Eh!

Friend. What is the matter?

Miss Haythorn. Open the door! Open the door!

There was a sound of hurried whispers, the door was shut and the blind
pulled down with hostile sharpness.

If any critic falls on me for putting inarticulate sounds in a dialogue as
above, I answer with all the insolence I can command at present, "Hit boys
as big as yourself"; bigger perhaps, such as Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aristophanes; they began it, and I learned it of them, sore against my
will.

Miss Haythorn's scream lost most of its effect because the engine whistled
forty thousand murders at the same moment; and fictitious grief makes
itself heard when real cannot.

Between the tunnel and Bath our young friend had time to ask himself
whether his conduct had been marked by that delicate reserve which is
supposed to distinguish the perfect gentleman.

With a long face, real or feigned, he held open the door; his late friends
attempted to escape on the other side--impossible! they must pass him. She
whom he had insulted (Latin for kissed) deposited somewhere at his feet a
look of gentle, blushing reproach; the other, whom he had not insulted,
darted red-hot daggers at him from her eyes; and so they parted.

It was perhaps fortunate for Dolignan that he had the grace to be a friend
to Major Hoskyns of his regiment, a veteran laughed at by the youngsters,
for the major was too apt to look coldly upon billiard-balls and cigars;
he had seen cannon-balls and linstocks. He had also, to tell the truth,
swallowed a good bit of the mess-room poker, which made it as impossible
for Major Hoskyns to descend to an ungentlemanlike word or action as to
brush his own trousers below the knee.

Captain Dolignan told this gentleman his story in gleeful accents; but
Major Hoskyns heard him coldly, and as coldly answered that he had known a
man to lose his life for the same thing.

"That is nothing," continued the major, "but unfortunately he deserved to
lose it."

At this blood mounted to the younger man's temples; and his senior added,
"I mean to say he was thirty-five; you, I presume, are twenty-one!"

"Twenty-five."

"That is much the same thing; will you be advised by me?"

"If you will advise me."

"Speak to no one of this, and send White the three pounds, that he may
think you have lost the bet."

"That is hard, when I won it."

"Do it for all that, sir."

Let the disbelievers in human perfe