tion; or whether my friend
Harry Jekyl be not considering how far his own interference with
such a naughty business will be well taken at Head-quarters; and so,
without pausing on that question, I shall barely and briefly say,
that you cannot be more sensible than I am of the madness of
bringing matters to such an extremity--I have no such intention, I
assure you, and it is with no such purpose that I invite you
here.--Were I to challenge Martigny, he would refuse me the
meeting; and all less ceremonious ways of arranging such an affair
are quite old-fashioned.

"It is true, at our first meeting, I was betrayed into the scrape I
told you of--just as you may have shot (or shot _at_, for I think
you are no downright hitter) a hen-pheasant, when flushed within
distance, by a sort of instinctive movement, without reflecting on
the enormity you are about to commit. The truth is, there is an
ignis fatuus influence, which seems to govern our house--it poured
its wildfire through my father's veins--it has descended to me in
full vigour, and every now and then its impulse is irresistible.
There was my enemy, and here were my pistols, was all I had time to
think about the matter. But I will be on my guard in future, the
more surety, as I cannot receive any provocation from him; on the
contrary, if I must confess the truth, though I was willing to gloss
it a little in my first account of the matter, (like the Gazette,
when recording a defeat,) I am certain he would never voluntarily
have fired at me, and that his pistol went off as he fell. You know
me well enough to be assured, that I will never be again in the
scrape of attacking an unresisting antagonist, were he ten times my
brother.

"Then, as to this long tirade about hating my brother--Harry, I do
not hate him more than the first-born of Egypt are in general hated
by those whom they exclude from entailed estates, and so forth--not
one lauded man in twenty of us that is not hated by his younger
brothers, to the extent of wishing him quiet in his grave, as an
abominable stumbling-block in their path of life; and so far only do
I hate Monsieur Martigny. But for the rest, I rather like him as
otherwise; and would he but die, would give my frank consent to his
being canonized: and while he lives, I am not desirous that he
should be