Truth to tell, for some time past, the Duke of Ribblesdale had been but ill at ease. He was tired of the “trivial round” of fashionable London life. He wished he had gone into a regiment on foreign service, instead of into the household troops. He longed for a more active life. He had had ideas of cutting the army altogether, and of buying a yacht, and going off to the Faröe Isles, or the Isles of Greece, or, in short, anywhere to get away from Town, until the following year, when he would come of age. Now, another and greater idea had struck him, and it will be seen hereafter whether he was able to carry it out. Anyhow, the Duke felt it was something to have got a new idea at all, and when he jumped into a hansom at Waterloo, he felt in better spirits than he had done for some months past. Let us thank Providence that “the Jeunesse Dorée” of England are not yet like those of some other countries, and especially like those of the Bourgeois Empire of Napoleon the Little, or of the “one-horse” Republic, as the Yankees have it, which has succeeded his tyrannical and debasing rule. CHAPTER XX. THE VEHME-GERICHT OF HAMPTON COURT. MENTION having already been casually made of a certain Lady M’Adam, it will be proper to inform the reader of some of the antecedents of that bright orange luminary and devoted disciple of the great Mr. Moodle. Clara M’Dougal, then, was the only daughter of a worthy pork-merchant of Carrickfergus, who, at the mature age of five-and-twenty, espoused one Peter M’Adam, an eminent whiskey distiller, and elder of the Presbyterian sect at Belfast. This Peter M’Adam was a great Orangeman, and a staunch supporter of a very clever lawyer, who, chiefly through this distiller’s moral influence and indifferent whiskey, became Member of Parliament for Lisdoonacorrigan, and afterwards, by his own talents, Solicitor General, and who finally ascended the woolsack as Lord Yellowlily of Carrignatuohil in the County of Antrim. His Lordship, unlike those base wretches who are always ready to kick down the ladder by which they rose, never forgot a favour, or one who had rendered it. “He knew a trick worth two of that,” he once coarsely observed to a colleague. Like Napoleon the Little, Lord Yellowlily always repaid an obligation, but, like the same _parvenu_ despot, he repaid it _as_ an obligation, and then he stopt short. He never repaid it with interest, however small, and he neither felt nor expressed gratitude. He nicely discriminated the precise amount of the debt, and as nicely calculated the amount he ought to pay in return; and then, and not before then, he paid it, and had done with his benefactor for ever. Thus it was that, when Peter M’Adam, who had been knighted for presenting an address of congratulation to Her Majesty on the occasion of the birth of one of her numerous German grand-children, had gone the way of all flesh, with his claims unsatisfied, Lord