He was a very agreeable young gentleman, of cavalier rank, debonair and smart to foppery, which as yet, however, stopped short of the extravagance which later came to characterize it. He wore his own long chestnut hair, and a lingering tone of sobriety marked his dress. The times, in fact, had not quite pulled free their damasked wings from the Puritan case which had enclosed them, though certain foreshadowed iridescences gave promise of the splendour to come; and, moreover, the gentleman had ridden in that morning from the country, and had been in no mind to stake his sweetest trappings against the habitual quagmires of Oxford Street. He dismounted at “The Mischief” for his morning draught, and, giving his horse to hold to his servant, sat down at a table in the yard, and hammered for the drawer. George was a bold youth of his inches--which were sufficient--but quite immoral and unscrupulous. He fitted amiably into his age, which expected nothing better of a man than good company. That he supplied, and could have supplied in purer brand if good-fellowship had been its inevitable corollary. But there he lacked. Generally he wished no man good but where he saw his own profit of the sentiment; and he could be an inhuman friend. He had regular, rather full features, and a rolling brown eye which took in much that had been kindlier left unobserved; and, like most of his order, he was infernally pugnacious. While his ale was bringing, he sat, one arm akimbo, the other crossed on his knee, conning, as if they were cattle, the group about him, and humming an abstracted tune. There was no one who interested him much, or who touched a note of originality in all the commonplace crowd which surrounded him. Grooms, carters, local traders; a seedy rakehell or two; a lowering Anabaptist, sipping his ale with a toast in it, and furtively conscious the while of the scrutiny of a yellow trained-band Captain lolling by the tap door; a prowling pitcher-bawd, lean, red-eyed, and hugging his famine as he ogled about for custom--one and all they conformed to type, and presented nothing beyond it worth considering. George felt quarrelsome over the matter, as if he had been defrauded of a legitimate expectation. True, mankind in its ordinary habits and conversation could hardly be looked to at the best for more than diluted epigram; yet there should be a limit to the insipidity of things, and he felt it almost his duty to insist upon the fact. Possibly his brain was a little fevered from last night’s debauch. The seedy Mohawks were his nearest neighbours. Said one to his fellow, in the words of Banquo’s murderer: “It will be rain to-night.” Hamilton turned on him. “Who says so, clout?” “Sir!” exclaimed the young man, startled aback. “I say, who says so?” “I say so.” “Then a pox on your profanity! Are you to arrogate to yourself the Almighty’s prerogatives? It shall rain or not as the Lord decrees.” “Hallelujah, young sir!” boomed the Anabaptist.