The room was small and low and packed with furniture of all styles and ages, more like a dealer's shop than an ordinary room. Folk said that many a quaint and costly ornament had found its way to John Race's in settlement of ale shots and gone to deck the room which was his wife's delight. But Captain Northman or his friends had treated it with scant reverence. On a table in the centre were a pack or two of cards and a couple of candles, that had guttered in the socket. A decanter half full of brandy stood by their side, whilst another, empty, and the fragments of a glass, lay on the floor. Boots, spurs, gloves, swords canes, were strewn about on the chairs, and the scent of stale tobacco reek and fumes of strong waters filled the room. A table, with an untasted breakfast set upon it, was drawn to the window, and by it, in a cushioned chair, sat a young man of some five and twenty years, dressed in his small clothes and a gaudy dressing-gown, yawning wofully and raising with unsteady hand a morning draught to his tremulous lips. He had evidently had a night of it and his temper was none the better for it. I raised my hand respectfully to my forehead as I had seen soldiers do, but he only stretched out his legs and stared me rudely in the face. "Well, fellow," he said at length, "what's your pleasure of me that you must break in on my breakfast?" "My name, sir, is Benjamin Bamforth." "Ben o' Bill's o' Holme," said the landlord. "Well, why the devil can't he stop at home?" said my lord. "Come, sir, your business." "Captain Northman," I said civilly, and speaking my finest, nothing daunted by his captaincy, but nettled by his slack manners, for even Mr. Chew, the vicar, treated me with civility as my father's son; "Captain Northman, you have in your Company, a soldier known as Long Tom, his proper name I know not, nor his rank." "Corporal Tom, well, what of him?" "Sir, I complain that last night he did wantonly and without enticement or other warrant insult my own cousin Mary, as she was returning home late in the evening." "Well, sir?" "And I lay this complaint that he may be punished as he deserves." "And is that all?" "And enough too, it seems to me, Captain Northman." "Good God! was ever the like heard!" exclaimed the Captain. "Here I am half pulled out of my bed in the small hours by a giant boor, my head all splitting with this vile liquor not fit for hog wash, and all because Long Tom chooses to kiss a pretty girl, who ten to one was nothing loth." "Captain Northman," I said, very quietly, "I may be a boor, but I am one of the boors that pay your wages. Neither is it the part of a gentleman to meet a request for redress by an added insult. But I see I mistook my man and now I shall take my own course." So I turned on my heels and strode down the steps. "Long Tom's in the kitchen," whispered 'Siah, and to the kitchen I strode.