Lady Bell had even so pleasing a trust in the sedately fault-finding young sea-captain, that she had not the slightest qualm when he at once did her bidding and consented to be elected her escort, such as she would have had with almost any other of the gay danglers about her, and notably with the agreeable Sir George. “Captain Fane is such a manly, true young spark,” she took it upon her to decide, for her private satisfaction, though how she had arrived at the strong conclusion after one or two bantering, bickering interviews, unless from information derived from Lady Sundon, to whose judgment Lady Bell was not wont to pin her faith, it puzzles one to guess. “He is a little prejudiced and hard,” continued Lady Bell, mentally taking stock of her companion, “but I can melt him” (there was the triumph!). “I think I know how he would look boarding a ship, and how I could make him drop his sword,” which was a purely imaginative vision. As Lady Bell and Captain Fane passed along the streets, they became eye-witnesses to a curious political contradiction. At one thoroughfare, men were stationed with handbills, to be distributed to respectable and influential persons, especially to members of parliament, praying them to stop the shedding of their American brethren’s blood. At another thoroughfare, the pedestrians had to thread their way through a crowd—the centre of which was the common hangman in the act of burning, to the accompaniment of tumultuous applause, copies of a pamphlet entitled “The Present Crisis with respect to America,” which had been condemned by both Houses, as a flagrant insult to the King. Captain Fane informed Lady Bell that this difference of opinion had even penetrated to the services. He brought forward the instance of Lord Viscount Pitt, son to my Lord Chatham, having asked leave to resign his commission, since he was determined not to serve in a war between the mother country and her colony. “And what do you say, sir?” inquired Lady Bell. “I say that it is too late to stop a fratricidal war, save by fighting it out as quickly as may be, and that even if it were not so, it is for me to obey, not to issue, orders,” he replied with decision. At Leicester Fields Lady Bell’s ticket procured the admission of the lady and her friend, first into the parlour, where an untidy, abrupt, cordial elderly woman, was herself painting a miniature and hurriedly sopping up her spilt paint, when she heard the steps of visitors. This was Mrs. Frances Reynolds, who painted “The grimly ghost of Johnson,” and wrote the “Essay on Taste”—printed but never published. She was soon on familiar terms with the intruders.