This was merely the repetition of counsel of the same friendly nature previously urged. The shock was not greater, therefore, than the young man’s nerves could bear. “How is it to be done?” asked the neophyte. “Oh, I think I can manage that for you. Yes,” pursued the Captain, musing, “Lazarus would let you have as much as you want, I dare say. His terms are rather high, to be sure; but then the cash is the thing. He’ll take your acceptance at once. Who will you get to draw the bill?” “Draw!” said the Ensign, in a state of some bewilderment. “I don’t understand these things—couldn’t you do it?” “Why,” replied the Captain, with an air of intense sincerity, “I’d do it for you with pleasure—nothing would delight me more; but I promised my grandmother, when first I entered the service, that I never _would_ draw a bill as long as I lived; and as a man of honour, you know, and a soldier, I can’t break my word.” “But I thought you said you had a bill of your own coming due to-morrow,” observed the astute Spoonbill. “So I did,” said the Captain, taken rather aback in the midst of his protestations, “but then it isn’t—exactly—a thing of _this_ sort; it’s a kind of a—bond—as it were—old family matters—the estate down in Lincolnshire—that I’m clearing off. Besides,” he added, hurriedly, “there are plenty of fellows who’ll do it for you. There’s young Brittles—the Manchester man, who joined just after you. I never saw anybody screw into baulk better than he does, except yourself—he’s the one. Lazarus, I know, always prefers a young customer to an old one; knowing chaps, these Jews, arn’t they?” Captain Cushion’s last remark was, no doubt, a just one—but he might have applied the term to himself with little dread of disparagement; and the end of the conversation was, that it was agreed a bill should be drawn as proposed, “say for three hundred pounds,” the Captain undertaking to get the affair arranged, and relieving Spoonbill of all trouble, save that of “merely” writing his name across a bit of stamped paper. These points being settled, the Captain left him, and the unprotected subaltern called for brandy and soda-water, by the aid of which stimulus he was enabled to rise and perform his toilette.