count
Gallowglass and Killbrogue, and Lord Bishop of Ballyshannon), great
festivities took place at Chanticlere, whither the relatives of the high
contracting parties were invited. Among them came poor Jack Belsize, and
hence the tears which are dropping at Baden at this present period of
our history. Clara Pulleyn was then a pretty little maiden of sixteen,
and Jack a handsome guardsman of six or seven and twenty. As she had
been especially warned against Jack as a wicked young rogue, whose
antecedents were wofully against him; as she was never allowed to sit
near him at dinner, or to walk with him, or to play at billiards with
him, or to waltz with him; as she was scolded if he spoke a word to her,
or if he picked up her glove, or touched her hand in a round game, or
caught him when they were playing at blindman's-buff; as they neither
of them had a penny in the world, and were both very good-looking, of
course Clara was always catching Jack at blindman's-buff; constantly
lighting upon him in the shrubberies or corridors, etc. etc. etc. She
fell in love (she was not the first) with Jack's broad chest and thin
waist; she thought his whiskers as indeed they were, the handsomest pair
in all His Majesty's Brigade of Cuirassiers.

We know not what tears were shed in the vast and silent halls of
Chanticlere, when the company were gone, and the four cooks, and four
maids, six footmen, and temporary butler had driven back in their
private trap to the metropolis, which is not forty miles distant
from that splendid castle. How can we tell? The guests departed, the
lodge-gates shut; all is mystery:--darkness with one pair of wax candles
blinking dismally in a solitary chamber; all the rest dreary vistas
of brown hollands, rolled Turkey carpets, gaunt ancestors on the walls
scowling out of the twilight blank. The imagination is at liberty to
depict his lordship, with one candle, over his dreadful endless tapes
and papers; her ladyship with the other, and an old, old novel, wherein
perhaps, Mrs. Radcliffe describes a castle as dreary as her own; and
poor little Clara sighing and crying in the midst of these funereal
splendours, as lonely and heart-sick as Oriana in her moated
grange:--poor little Clara!

Lord Kew's drag took the young men to London; his lordship driving, and
the servants sitting inside. Jack sat behind with the two grooms, and
tooted on a cornet-a-piston in the most melancholy manner. He partook
of no refreshmen