“If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher, I couldn’t be _much_ worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?” This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room. “Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice--the whistler had broken off in the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of Erin dwells,”--“yes, captain, quite ready.” “That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,--“the fellow will call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.” “But you see you _are_ captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler, emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and any amount of convicts to look after.” “If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the _vieille roche_, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his companion--a cheerful _bourgeois_, who pretended to make light of his situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets something.” “That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign Harcourt Lowther. If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world. But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear--the companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual discontent.