“Ha! ha! Milord Courtland, you are mine--your purse, your credit, your influence--all are mine! But what a child it is! what a baby! _Sacré!_ at his age I was winning twenty pounds a day at billiards in New Orleans!--And you, Harry Coverdale, _mon ami_, I will teach you to watch me with black looks when I am conversing with _la belle millionaire_; you had better attend to your own wife now--young, pretty, and neglected! _Le petit_ Alfred has a fair game before him, if he have but wit to play it--yes! all goes as it should! fortune fills the sails! there is a cool head and a steady hand at the helm: _vogue la galère!_” CHAPTER XXXIV.--CIRCE. In this “tight little island,”--of which as a whole we are all so proud, although it affords ample occupation for its public in grumbling at its institutions, _viâ_ its _Times_ newspaper--the only season of the year when fogs are not, and every day does not resemble a “washing-day” on a large scale, the only period in fact when the country is endurable, is the early summer. Thus the educated classes, whose well-balanced and carefully developed minds enable them to arrive at sound conclusions, and whose well-stored pockets render them free to come and go untrammelled by pecuniary considerations, have bound themselves by the laws of the tyrant Fashion to spend June and July in London, where they simmer in hot rooms, when they should be in bed and asleep, until all the goodness is boiled out of them--which new “theory of evil” beg to offer to the notice of Miss Martineau, and all other speculative minds anxious to elevate humanity by substituting earthly nonsense for heavenly revelation. But however you may brick her up and smoke-dry her, nature will assert herself, and, turning with disgust from oats at 40s. the quarter in a mahogany manger, pine for green meat and a canter over the spring turf. So a compromise has been effected between town and country amusements, and horticultural _fêtes_ have been devised to afford parboiled fashionables breathing time between their rounds of dissipation, together with a gentle reminder of the “pleasures of the plains,” which they are sacrificing to their craving for unnatural excitement. Horticultural _fêtes_ are brought about in this wise: Early in the inclemency of a British spring, while London is shivering over its fondly cherished fire, that noun of multitude perceives in the first column of its _Times_ a notice that members of the Horticultural Society may obtain tickets at privileged prices until some specified day; thereupon All-London writes to its particular friend the M. H. S. for an “order,” and the member vouching by implication for All-London’s standing and respectability--into which he has probably gone no deeper than its coat--All-London besieges the office of that floral autocrat, Dr. Lindley, and clamours for tickets, crying “Give, give,” and insatiable as the daughter of the horse-leech. Having at length obtained