sonal
strength which, as if in the exuberance of animal spirits, he would
sometimes condescend to display, by feats that astonished the curious
and frightened the timid,--such as bending a poker or horseshoe between
hands elegantly white, nor unadorned with rings,--or lifting the weight
of Samuel Dolly by the waistband, and holding him at arm's length, with
a playful bet of ten to one that he could stand by the fireplace and
pitch the said Samuel Dolly out of the open window. To know so strong a
man, so fine an animal, was something to boast of. Then, too, if Jasper
had a false brilliancy, he had also a false bonhommie: it was true
that he was somewhat imperious, swaggering, bullying; but he was also
off-hand and jocund; and as you knew him, that sidelong look, that
defying gait (look and gait of the man whom the world cuts), wore away.
In fact, he had got into a world which did not cut him, and his exterior
was improved by the atmosphere.

Mr. Losely professed to dislike general society. Drawing rooms were
insipid; clubs full of old fogies. "I am for life, my boys," said Mr.
Losely,

"'Can sorrow from the goblet flow,
Or pain from Beauty's eye?'"

Mr. Losely, therefore, his hat on one side, lounged into the saloons of
theatres, accompanied by a cohort of juvenile admirers, their hats on
one side also, and returned to the pleasantest little suppers in his own
apartment. There "the goblet" flowed; and after the goblet, cigars for
some, and a rubber for all.

So puissant Losely's vitality, and so blest by the stars his luck, that
his form seemed to wax stronger and his purse fuller by this "life."
No wonder he was all for a life of that kind; but the slight beings
who tried to keep up with him grew thinner and thinner, and poorer
and poorer; a few weeks made their cheeks spectral and their pockets a
dismal void. Then as some dropped off from sheer inanition, others whom
they had decoyed by their praises of "Life" and its hero came into the
magic circle to fade and vanish in their turn.

In a space of time incredibly brief, not a whist-player was left upon
the field: the victorious Losely had trumped out the last; some few whom
Nature had endowed more liberally than Fortune still retained strength
enough to sup--if asked;

"But none who came to sup remained to play."

"Plague on it," said Losely to Poole, as one afternoon they were
dividing the final spoils, "your friends are mightily soon cleaned o