n all
its glory. My lady had a fine taste for building, and furniture,
and playhouses, and she turned everything topsy-turvy, and made the
barrack-room into a theatre, as she called it, and she went on as if
she had a mint of money at her elbow; and to be sure I thought she knew
best, especially as Sir Condy said nothing to it one way or the other.
All he asked--God bless him!--was to live in peace and quietness, and
have his bottle or his whisky-punch at night to himself. Now this was
little enough, to be sure, for any gentleman; but my lady couldn't abide
the smell of the whisky-punch.

'My dear,' says he, 'you liked it well enough before we were married,
and why not now?'

'My dear,' said she, 'I never smelt it, or I assure you I should never
have prevailed upon myself to marry you.'

'My dear, I am sorry you did not smell it, but we can't help that now,'
returned my master, without putting himself in a passion, or going out
of his way, but just fair and easy helped himself to another glass, and
drank it off to her good health.

All this the butler told me, who was going backwards and forwards
unnoticed with the jug, and hot water, and sugar, and all he thought
wanting. Upon my master's swallowing the last glass of whisky-punch
my lady burst into tears, calling him an ungrateful, base, barbarous
wretch; and went off into a fit of hysterics, as I think Mrs. Jane
called it, and my poor master was greatly frightened, this being the
first thing of the kind he had seen; and he fell straight on his knees
before her, and, like a good-hearted cratur as he was, ordered the
whisky-punch out of the room, and bid 'em throw open all the windows,
and cursed himself: and then my lady came to herself again, and when
she saw him kneeling there, bid him get up, and not forswear himself any
more, for that she was sure he did not love her, and never had. This
we learned from Mrs. Jane, who was the only person left present at all
this.

'My dear,' returns my master, thinking, to be sure, of Judy, as well he
might, 'whoever told you so is an incendiary, and I'll have 'em turned
out of the house this minute, if you'll only let me know which of them
it was.'

'Told me what?' said my lady, starting upright in her chair.

'Nothing at all, nothing at all,' said my master, seeing he had overshot
himself, and that my lady spoke at random; 'but what you said just now,
that I did not love you, Bella; who told you that?'

'My own sense,'