loven hoof.
--ANONYMOUS.

Julian Peveril had scarce set sail for Whitehaven, when Alice
Bridgenorth and her governante, at the hasty command of her father,
were embarked with equal speed and secrecy on board of a bark bound for
Liverpool. Christian accompanied them on their voyage, as the friend
to whose guardianship Alice was to be consigned during any future
separation from her father, and whose amusing conversation, joined to
his pleasing though cold manners, as well as his near relationship,
induced Alice, in her forlorn situation, to consider her fate as
fortunate in having such a guardian.

At Liverpool, as the reader already knows, Christian took the first
overt step in the villainy which he had contrived against the innocent
girl, by exposing her at a meeting-house to the unhallowed gaze of
Chiffinch, in order to convince him she was possessed of such uncommon
beauty as might well deserve the infamous promotion to which they
meditated to raise her.

Highly satisfied with her personal appearance, Chiffinch was no less
so with the sense and delicacy of her conversation, when he met her in
company with her uncle afterwards in London. The simplicity, and at
the same time the spirit of her remarks, made him regard her as his
scientific attendant the cook might have done a newly invented sauce,
sufficiently _piquante_ in its qualities to awaken the jaded appetite
of a cloyed and gorged epicure. She was, he said and swore, the very
corner-stone on which, with proper management, and with his instruction,
a few honest fellows might build a Court fortune.

That the necessary introduction might take place, the confederates
judged fit she should be put under the charge of an experienced
lady, whom some called Mistress Chiffinch, and others Chiffinch's
mistress--one of those obliging creatures who are willing to discharge
all the duties of a wife, without the inconvenient and indissoluble
ceremony.

It was one, and not perhaps the least prejudicial consequence of the
license of that ill-governed time, that the bounds betwixt virtue and
vice were so far smoothed down and levelled, that the frail wife, or the
tender friend who was no wife, did not necessarily lose their place in
society; but, on the contrary, if they moved in the higher circles, were
permitted and encouraged to mingle with women whose rank was certain,
and whose reputation was untainted.

A regular _liaiso