“Did I not?” replied Kenelm, with an unconscious start, as from an abstracted reverie. “With no undistinguished host, I presume, for when I asked him this morning for the right address of this cottage, in order to direct such luggage as I have to be sent there, he gave me his card with a grand air, saying, ‘I am pretty well known at Moleswich, by and beyond it.’ I have not yet looked at his card. Oh, here it is,--‘Algernon Sidney Gale Jones, Cromwell Lodge;’ you laugh. What do you know of him?” “I wish my husband were here; he would tell you more about him. Mr. Jones is quite a character.” “So I perceive.” “A great radical,--very talkative and troublesome at the vestry; but our vicar, Mr. Emlyn, says there is no real harm in him, that his bark is worse than his bite, and that his republican or radical notions must be laid to the door of his godfathers! In addition to his name of Jones, he was unhappily christened Gale; Gale Jones being a noted radical orator at the time of his birth. And I suppose Algernon Sidney was prefixed to Gale in order to devote the new-born more emphatically to republican principles.” “Naturally, therefore, Algernon Sidney Gale Jones baptizes his house Cromwell Lodge, seeing that Algernon Sidney held the Protectorate in especial abhorrence, and that the original Gale Jones, if an honest radical, must have done the same, considering what rough usage the advocates of Parliamentary Reform met with at the hands of his Highness. But we must be indulgent to men who have been unfortunately christened before they had any choice of the names that were to rule their fate. I myself should have been less whimsical had I not been named after a Kenelm who believed in sympathetic powders. Apart from his political doctrines, I like my landlord: he keeps his wife in excellent order. She seems frightened at the sound of her own footsteps, and glides to and fro, a pallid image of submissive womanhood in list slippers.” “Great recommendations certainly, and Cromwell Lodge is very prettily situated. By the by, it is very near Mrs. Cameron’s.” “Now I think of it, so it is,” said Kenelm, innocently. Ah! my friend Kenelm, enemy of shams, and truth-teller, _par excellence_, what hast thou come to? How are the mighty fallen! “Since you say you will dine with us, suppose we fix the day after to-morrow, and I will ask Mrs. Cameron and Lily.” “The day after to-morrow: I shall be delighted.” “An early hour?” “The earlier the better.” “Is six o’clock too early?” “Too early! certainly not; on the contrary. Good-day: I must now go to Mrs. Somers; she has charge of my portmanteau.” Then Kenelm rose. “Poor dear Lily!” said Mrs. Braefield; “I wish she were less of a child.” Kenelm reseated himself. “Is she a child? I don’t think she is actually a child.”