d; he walked erect, but always nervously grasping my
arm--fearing, apparently, to lose sight of me for a moment, lest his
fortune, should vanish with me. The impatient pride with which he gave
his orders to the astonished tradesman for the finest and best of
everything, and the amazed air of the fashionable hairdresser when he
presented his matted locks and stubble chin, to be "cut and shaved," may
be _acted_--it cannot be described.

By the time the external transformation was complete, and I
sat down in a Cafe in the Haymarket opposite a haggard but handsome
thoroughbred-looking man, whose air, with the exception of the wild eyes
and deeply browned face, did not differ from the stereotyped men about
town sitting around us, Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy had already almost
forgotten the past. He bullied the waiter, and criticised the wine, as if
he had done nothing else but dine and drink and scold there all the days
of his life.

Once he wished to drink my health, and would have proclaimed his whole
story to the coffee-room assembly, in a raving style. When I left he
almost wept in terror at the idea of losing sight of me. But, allowing
for these ebullitions--the natural result of such a whirl of events--he
was wonderfully calm and self-possessed.

The next day, his first care was to distribute fifty pounds among his
friends, the cadgers, at a "house of call" in Westminster, and formally
to dissolve his connection with them; those present undertaking for the
"fraternity," that for the future he should never be noticed by them in
public or private.

I cannot follow his career much further. Adversity had taught him
nothing. He was soon again surrounded by the well-bred vampires who had
forgotten him when penniless; but they amused him, and that was enough.
The ten thousand pounds were rapidly melting when he invited me to a
grand dinner at Richmond, which included a dozen of the most agreeable,
good-looking, well-dressed dandies of London, interspersed with a display
of pretty butterfly bonnets. We dined deliciously, and drank as men do of
iced wines in the dog-days--looking down from Richmond Hill.

One of the pink-bonnets crowned Fitz-Roy with a wreath of flowers; he
looked--less the intellect--as handsome as Alcibiades. Intensely
excited and flushed, he rose with a champagne glass in his hand to
propose my health.

The oratorical powers of his father had not descended on him. Jerking
out sentences by spasms, at length h