pare her sons when
there is any chance of their getting into mischief. Roger has taken Mrs.
Huntley. _That_, poor man, he could hardly help, his only alternative
being his own sister-in-law. Musgrave has taken Barbara. He is still as
white as the table-cloth, and hardly speaks. It is clear that _he_ will
not get up his conversation again, until after the champagne has been
round. Algy has taken no one; and, consequently, a bear is an amiable
and affable beast in comparison of him. I am placed between our host and
his nephew. The latter comes in for a good deal of my conversation, as
most of my remarks have to be taken up and rebellowed by him with a loud
emphasis, that contrasts absurdly with their triviality; and even then
they mostly miscarry, and turn into something totally different.

Talking to the old man is not a dialogue, but a couple of soliloquies,
carried on mostly on different subjects, which in vain try to become the
same, between two interlocutors. Through soup we prospered--that is to
say, we talked of the weather; and though I said several things about it
that surprised me a good deal, yet we both knew that we _were_ talking
of the weather. But since then we have been diverging ever more and more
hopelessly. _He_ is at the shah's visit, and so he imagines am I. I, on
the contrary, am at the Bishop of Winchester's death, and, for the last
five minutes have been trying, with all the force of my lungs, and with
a face rendered scarlet by the double action of heat and of the
consciousness of being the object of respectful attention to the whole
company, to convey to him that, in my opinion, the deceased prelate
ought to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. I have at last
succeeded, at least in so far as to make him understand that I wish
_somebody_ to be buried in Westminster Abbey; but, as he still persists
in thinking it the shah, we are perhaps not much better off than we were
before. I lean back with a sense of despairing defeat, and, behind my
fan, turn to the young man on the other side. He is a jolly-looking
fellow, with an aureole of fiery red hair.

"Would you mind," say I, with panting appeal, "trying to make him
understand that it _is not_ the shah?"

He complies, and, while he is trying to make it clear to his uncle that
he wrongs me in crediting me with any wish to thrust the Persian monarch
among the ashes of the Plantagenets, I take breath, and look round
again. Algy is eating nothing, and