About this time we find Hydra, as Byron pleasantly called his mother, rushing to the village apothecary and warning that worthy not to sell poison to the poet; and a few moments after her leaving, the astonished apothecary was visited by the poet, who begged that no poison should be sold to his mother. Each thought the other was going to turn Lucretia Borgia, or play the last act of Romeo and Juliet, at least. There were wild bursts of rage on the mother's part, stubborn mockery on the other, followed up once by a poker flung with almost fatal precision at the poet's curly head. Upon this he took flight to London and Hydra followed, repentant and lacrimose. A truce was patched up; they agreed to disagree, and coldly shaking hands withdrew in opposite directions. After this, when the poet wrote he addressed his mother as "Dear Madam," and confined himself to business matters. Only rarely was there any flash in his letters, as when he said, "Dear Mother—you know you are a vixen, but save me some champagne." If Byron's mother had been of the stuff of which most mothers are made, we would have found these two safely settled at Newstead, making the best of their battered fortune, with the son in time marrying some neighbor lass, and slipping into the place of a respectable English gentleman, a worthy member of the House of Lords. But the boy, now grown twenty, had no home, and either was supplied too much money or else too little. He wasted his substance in London, economized in Southwell, sponged on friends, and borrowed of Scrope Davis at Cambridge. When a remittance again came, he explored the greenrooms, took lessons from Professor Johnson, the pugilist (referred to as "my corporeal pastor"), drank whole companies under the table, bought a tame bear and a wolf to guard the entrance of Newstead, and roamed the country as a gipsy, in company with a girl dressed in boy's clothes, thus supplying Richard Le Gallienne an interesting chapter in his "Quest of the Golden Girl." But all this time his brain was active, and another book of poetry had been printed, entitled "Hours of Idleness." This book was gotten out, at his own expense, by the same country printer as the first. Surely the verse must have had merit, or why should Lord Brougham, in the great "Edinburgh Review," go after it with a slashing, crashing, damning criticism? When Byron read the review, a bystander has told us he turned red, then livid green. He straightway ordered and drank two bottles of claret, said nothing, but looked like a man who had sent a challenge.