t. Not but what he could feel with mettlesome youth which, caring
nought for the mows of dotards or the gruntlings of the severe, is ever
(as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer expresses it) for eating of the
tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to pretermit humanity upon any
condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she was about her lawful
occasions. To conclude, while from the sister's words he had reckoned
upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be owned, not a little
alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so auspicated after an
ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the mercy as well as to
the bounty of the Supreme Being.

Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express
his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express
one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not
to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement
since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy
young blade said it was her husband's that put her in that expectation
or at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I
must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the table so as to
evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujurum was round
again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his
nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I
bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon.
'Slife, I'll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of
the old bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell
to praising of it, each after his own fashion, though the same young
blade held with his former view that another than her conjugial had
been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or
an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every household. Singular,
communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of
metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the
dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the
mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a
pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of
an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But,
he further added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in
common oppress them for I have more th