of China--come forth, Confucius, and Commissioner Yeh! Passing a few
paces, we are in the land of the Zegri and Abencerrage:

'Land of the dark-eyed maid and dusky Moor.'

Mr. Poole's house is called Alhambra Villa! Moorish
verandahs--plate-glass windows, with cusped heads and mahogany sashes--a
garden behind, a smaller one in front--stairs ascending to the doorway
under a Saracenic portico, between two pedestalled lions that resemble
poodles--the whole new and lustrous--in semblance stone, in substance
stucco-cracks in the stucco denoting "settlements." But the house being
let for ninety-nine years--relet again on a running lease of seven,
fourteen, and twenty-one--the builder is not answerable for duration,
nor the original lessee for repairs. Take it altogether, than
Alhambra Villa masonry could devise no better type of modern taste and
metropolitan speculation.

Mr. Poole, since we saw him between four and five years ago, has entered
the matrimonial state. He has married a lady of some money, and become a
reformed man. He has eschewed the turf, relinquished Belcher neckcloths
and Newmarket coats-dropped his old-bachelor acquaintances. When a man
marries and reforms, especially when marriage and reform are
accompanied with increased income, and settled respectably in Alhambra
Villa--relations, before estranged, tender kindly overtures: the world,
before austere, becomes indulgent. It was so with Poole--no longer
Dolly. Grant that in earlier life he had fallen into bad ways, and,
among equivocal associates, had been led on by that taste for sporting
which is a manly though a perilous characteristic of the true-born
Englishman; he who loves horses is liable to come in contact with
blacklegs; the racer is a noble animal; but it is his misfortune that
the better his breeding the worse his company:--Grant that, in the
stables, Adolphus Samuel Poole had picked up some wild oats--he had sown
them now. Bygones were bygones. He had made a very prudent marriage.
Mrs. Poole was a sensible woman--had rendered him domestic, and would
keep him straight! His uncle Samuel, a most worthy man, had found him
that sensible woman, and, having found her, had paid his nephew's debts,
and adding a round sum to the lady's fortune, had seen that the whole
was so tightly settled on wife and children that Poole had the tender
satisfaction of knowing that, happen what might to himself, those dear
ones were safe; nay, that if, in the re