When the tea-things had been removed, and the party had settled themselves down for a friendly chat, Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys recounted to the Major all the adventures they had gone through since their departure from Buttermere; and the Major, in his turn, when he had sympathized and laughed with them at their many troubles, ran over the several feats of arms performed by himself and their mutual friend, the Colonel, in India. He told them how they had gouged a diamond worth several lacs of rupees out of the eye of one of the idols they had taken;—and the Sandboys, on the other hand, informed him how they had been defrauded of their season ticket for the Great Exhibition by a scoundrelly Frenchman styling himself the Count de Sangshimmy. And thus they continued, each narrating to the other the several scenes in which they had figured as principal actors, till Mr. Sandboys, in summing up the long list of mishaps he had experienced in his endeavours to get a sight of the contents of the Great Exhibition, was irresistibly led to the conclusion that the whole series of events was the work of a stony-hearted Fate, and that it formed part of the records of Destiny, as kept by the Registrar-General of Calamities-to-come, that neither he nor any member of his family should ever set foot in the interior of the Crystal Palace. He began to regard himself as the hero in some Greek tragedy, which he had a faint remembrance of reading in his college days at St. Bees. Accordingly, he communicated to his dear Aggy the resolution which the recapitulation of his many trials had induced in his mind—namely, that it was sheer pig-headedness on their part to attempt to swim against the current of events, or to play the Canute of 1851, and seek to drive back the tide in their affairs.