“I am vastly honoured, sir,” said my father, looking suspiciously at his guest from under his shaggy eyebrows, for with that grave face and those twinkling eyes it was hard to know how to take him. “A woman, sir, has her love to bestow,” said my uncle. “A man has his snuff-box. Neither is to be lightly offered. It is a lapse of taste; nay, more, it is a breach of morals. Only the other day, as I was seated in Watier’s, my box of prime macouba open upon the table beside me, an Irish bishop thrust in his intrusive fingers. ‘Waiter,’ I cried, ‘my box has been soiled! Remove it!’ The man meant no insult, you understand, but that class of people must be kept in their proper sphere.’ “A bishop!” cried my father. “You draw your line very high, sir.” “Yes, sir,” said my uncle; “I wish no better epitaph upon my tombstone.” My mother had in the meanwhile descended, and we all drew up to the table. “You will excuse my apparent grossness, Mary, in venturing to bring my own larder with me. Abernethy has me under his orders, and I must eschew your rich country dainties. A little white wine and a cold bird—it is as much as the niggardly Scotchman will allow me.” “We should have you on blockading service when the levanters are blowing,” said my father. “Salt junk and weevilly biscuits, with a rib of a tough Barbary ox when the tenders come in. You would have your spare diet there, sir.” Straightway my uncle began to question him about the sea service, and for the whole meal my father was telling him of the Nile and of the Toulon blockade, and the siege of Genoa, and all that he had seen and done. But whenever he faltered for a word, my uncle always had it ready for him, and it was hard to say which knew most about the business. “No, I read little or nothing,” said he, when my father marvelled where he got his knowledge. “The fact is that I can hardly pick up a print without seeing some allusion to myself: ‘Sir C. T. does this,’ or ‘Sir C. T. says the other,’ so I take them no longer. But if a man is in my position all knowledge comes to him. The Duke of York tells me of the Army in the morning, and Lord Spencer chats with me of the Navy in the afternoon, and Dundas whispers me what is going forward in the Cabinet, so that I have little need of the _Times_ or the _Morning Chronicle_.” This set him talking of the great world of London, telling my father about the men who were his masters at the Admiralty, and my mother about the beauties of the town, and the great ladies at Almack’s, but all in the same light, fanciful way, so that one never knew whether to laugh or to take him gravely. I think it flattered him to see the way in which we all three hung upon his words. Of some he thought highly and of some lowly, but he made no secret that the highest of all, and the one against whom all others should be measured, was Sir Charles Tregellis himself.