chino. "I could tell you stories much more wonderful than that,"
he added; and so indeed the Captain could have done, without any further
trouble than that of invention, with which portion of the poetic faculty
Nature had copiously endowed him.

He laughed to scorn Pen's love for Miss Fotheringay, when he came to
hear of that amour from Arthur, as he pretty soon did, for, we have
said, Pen was not averse to telling the story now to his confidential
friends, and he and they were rather proud of the transaction. But
Macheath took away all Pen's conceit on this head, not by demonstrating
the folly of the lad's passion for an uneducated woman much his senior
in years, but by exposing his absurd desire of gratifying his passion in
a legitimate way. "Marry her," said he, "you might as well marry ----,"
and he named one of the most notorious actresses on the stage.

"She hadn't a shred of a character." He knew twenty men who were openly
admirers of her, and named them, and the sums each had spent upon her. I
know no kind of calumny more frightful or frequent than this which takes
away the character of women, no men more reckless and mischievous than
those who lightly use it, and no kind of cowards more despicable than
the people who invent these slanders.

Is it, or not, a misfortune that a man, himself of a candid disposition,
and disposed, like our friend Pen, to blurt out the truth on all
occasions, begins life by believing all that is said to him? Would it be
better for a lad to be less trustful, and so less honest? It requires
no small experience of the world to know that a man, who has no especial
reason thereto, is telling you lies. I am not sure whether it is not
best to go on being duped for a certain time. At all events, our honest
Pen had a natural credulity, which enabled him to accept all statements
which were made to him, and he took every one of Captain Macheath's
figments as if they had been the most unquestioned facts of history.

So Bloundell's account about Miss Fotheringay pained and mortified Pen
exceedingly. If he had been ashamed of his passion before,--what were
his feelings regarding it now, when the object of so much pure flame
and adoration turned out to be only a worthless impostor, an impostor
detected by all but him? It never occurred to Pen to doubt the fact, or
to question whether the stories of a man who, like his new friend, never
spoke well of any woman, were likely to be true.

One Easte