This was a mournful misapplication of energy. He had never known but one tune--the “Young Shepherd by love sore opprest,” which he would intone in moments of exaltation. Now he could not reconcile it to the practical intervals of performance, but was fain to introduce crippling variations in his hunt for the befitting string. It was the merest game of disharmonic spillikins, the contemplation of which affected his landlord almost to tears, and to any such enigmatical protest as the following:-- “You’ve no-ought to make such a noration about nothing!” “Very well,” Ned would answer; “but the spheres, you know, wrought harmony out of chaos.” Nevertheless he took his characteristic place in the hearts of the simple folk with whom he lodged. When, by-and-by, he was in a condition to stroll out into the living world once more, it was agreeable to him to learn that the old seaport place had been quit for some days of all that connection that had been the cause of his detention in it. His uncle was returned to town, carrying presumably Mademoiselle Lambertine with him; and the chevalier also had disappeared. He dozed out his second week, therefore--yielding his brain to the droning story of the sea--on the mattress of the sands; and, at last, revivified, braced up his energies and turned his face to the London that had grown unfamiliar to him. * * * * * * * * In accusing his nephew of inhabiting at some beggarly “Cock-and-Pye” tavern, my Lord Murk had uttered a vexatious anachronism that testified to little but his own antiquity. In the nobleman’s youth, indeed, the fields called after this hostelry, though then occupied by the seven recently laid-out fashionable streets that made “a star from a Doric pillar plac’d in the middle of a circular area” (_abrégé_, “Seven Dials,” though the capital of the column was, in fact, a hexagon only), were a traditional byword for low-life frivolity. Their character, however, was now long redeemed, or, at least, altered.