was full or his credit was good. At
those happy periods, he could give a friend, as he said, a good dinner,
a good glass of wine, and a good song afterwards; and poor Cos often
heard with envy the roar of Strong's choruses, and the musical clinking
of the glasses, as he sate in his own room, so far removed and yet so
near to those festivities. It was not expedient to invite Mr. Costigan
always: his practice of inebriation was lamentable; and he bored
Strong's guests with his stories when sober, and with his maudlin tears
when drunk.

A strange and motley set they were, these friends of the Chevalier;
and though Major Pendennis would not much have relished their company,
Arthur and Warrington liked it not a little, and Pen thought it as
amusing as the society of the finest gentlemen in the finest houses
which he had the honour to frequent. There was a history about every
man of the set: they seemed all to have had their tides of luck and bad
fortune. Most of them had wonderful schemes and speculations in their
pockets, and plenty for making rapid and extraordinary fortunes. Jack
Holt had been in Don Carlos's army, when Ned Strong had fought on the
other side; and was now organising a little scheme for smuggling tobacco
into London, which must bring thirty thousand a year to any man who
would advance fifteen hundred, just to bribe the last officer of the
Excise who held out, and had wind of the scheme. Tom Diver, who had been
in the Mexican navy, knew of a specie-ship which had been sunk in the
first year of the war, with three hundred and eighty thousand dollars on
board, and a hundred and eighty thousand pounds in bars and doubloons.
"Give me eighteen hundred pounds," Tom said, "and I'm off tomorrow. I
take out four men, and a diving-bell with me; and I return in ten
months to take my seat in Parliament, by Jove! and to buy back my family
estate." Keightley, the manager of the Tredyddlum and Polwheedle Copper
Mines (which were as yet under water), besides singing as good a second
as any professional man, and besides the Tredyddlum Office, had a Smyrna
Sponge Company, and a little quicksilver operation in view, which
would set him straight with the world yet. Filby had been everything
a corporal of dragoons, a field-preacher, and missionary-agent for
converting the Irish; an actor at a Greenwich fair-booth, in front of
which his father's attorney found him when the old gentleman died and
left him that famous property, f