Little Grand and I suffered cruelly. We were the butts of the mess for many a long month afterwards, when every idiot's tongue asked us on every side after the health of the Marchioness St. Julian? when we were going to teach them lansquenet? how often we heard from the aristocratic members of the Maltese Peerage? with like delightful pleasantries, which the questioners deemed high wit. We paid for it, too, to that arch old screw Balthazar; but I doubt very much if the money were not well lost, and the experience well gained. It cured me of my rawness and Little Grand of his self-conceit, the only thing that had before spoilt that good-hearted, quick-tempered, and clever-brained little fellow. Oh, Pater and Materfamilias, disturb not yourselves so unnecessarily about the crop of wild oats which your young ones are sowing broadcast. Those wild oats often spring from a good field of high spirit, hot courage, and thoughtless generosity, that are the sign and basis of nobler virtues to come, and from them very often rise two goodly plants--Experience and Discernment. LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES: OR, THE WORRIES OF A CHAPERONE. IN THREE SEASONS. SEASON THE FIRST.--THE ELIGIBLE. One of the kindest-natured persons that I ever knew on this earth, where kind people are as rare as black eagles or red deer, is Helena, Countess of Marabout, _née_ De Boncoeur. She has foibles, she has weaknesses--who amongst us has not?--she will wear her dresses _décolletées_, though she's sixty, if Burke tells us truth; she will rouge and practise a thousand other little toilette tricks, but they are surely innocent, since they deceive nobody; and if you wait for a woman who is no artifices, I am afraid you shall have to forswear the sex _in toto_, my friends, and come growling back to your Diogenes' tub in the Albany, with your lantern still lit every day of your lives. Lady Marabout is a very charming person. As for her weaknesses, she is all the nicer for them, to my taste. I like people with weaknesses myself; those without them do look so dreadfully scornfully and unsympathizingly upon one from the altitude of their superiority, _de toute la hauteur de sa bêtise_, as a witty Frenchman says. Humanity was born with weaknesses. If I were a beggar, I might hope for a coin from a man with some; a man without any, I know, would shut up his porte-monnaie, with an intensified click, to make me feel trebly envious, and consign me to D 15 and his truncheon, on the score of vagrancy.