With talk like this, the gentlemen arrived at the wharf. Why the boat they embarked in should be called a “cat,” they could not discover. A cat is fond of fish, as the poet hath it---- “What female heart can gold despise? What cat’s averse to fish?” Newport female hearts of the summer population despise not, but, several of them at least, do fitly esteem the yellow boys, and Newport cats and those who sail in them are not averse to fishing for fish and taking them. So Waddy smiled with his friends and thought too much of Tootler’s letter. He would watch Belden. Meantime, Mr. Waddy saw the world continuously,--and continuously was lionised. This has its pleasures and its pains. It does not build up lofty structures of respect towards the lioniser. Mr. Waddy, however, always had the charm of sweet refuge with his cousin, as he called her, Clara, fairest of the fair, and her friend, the divine Diana. Mrs. Waddy made immense dinner parties for the Returned Kinsman, where he met the people one meets in that best world, of which his hostess is so distinguished an ornament, etc. The particularly distinguished guest of that summer was the Hon. and Rev. Gorgias Pithwitch, the epideiktic sophist of the nadir Orient. Mr. Pithwitch was sometimes called “The Wizard of the North.” He drew immense houses to his pleasant jugglery. He had, that summer, as always, excellent man! some amiable charity to assist--such as to relieve Mahomet’s coffin from the painful uncertainties of its position--or to purchase ashes of roses to fill the cenotaph of Mausolus. Anything elegiac or pensively sepulchral gave him a cue for epideiktics or showing off. Mr. Pithwitch spoke on the character of Mahomet at Newport at the request of the Ladies’ Coffin Down Society. All the people who figure in this history went. People always go to hear things. The boys and girls thought the oration “thweet,” and so it was--just about. Mr. Belden went with Mrs. Budlong and whispered her safely through, playing meanwhile familiarly with the fringe of her flounces. How they began to eye each other now, those two! Tim Budlong escorted Miss Saccharissa Mellasys. A young poet, Edmund Waller by name, had fallen desperately in love with the soft, startled eyes of Saccharissa. She cast upon him sugar-melting glances, and he loved. Girls like poets and poets like girls. But Edmund, in the intervals of his sonnetteering Miss Mellasys, had been so unfortunate as to beat Tim Budlong regularly at billiards. Tim was in a porcupine state of mind and resolved to be revenged. He devoted himself to Saccharissa and she, well-knowing the cipher of the poet’s fortunes and the _chiffre_ of Tim’s, reciprocated the devotions. They first began to appear together in public at Pithwitch’s oration. People began to whisper. It was at this period of his life that Waller wrote his spasmodic poem, “The Beldame, or Blasted Hope.”