Tantallan, who are mad about private theatricals, who have turned the old northern feudal castle into an uncomfortable theatre, and whose most constant guests are little Hyams (the costumier) and Jubber ('heavy old man') of the Cracksideum Theatre, who 'gets up' the duke's plays. Sir Gerald Spoonbill and Lord Otho Faulconbridge, jolly old boys, flushed with hastily-eaten dinner at Foodle's, but delighting in the drama; the latter especially having inherited taste for it, his mother having been--well, you know all about that. That white waistcoat which glistens in the stalls could belong to no one but Mr. Marshall Moss, next to whom sit on either side Mr. Gompertz, the stockjobber, and Mr. Sergeant Orson, the last-named having entertained the other gentlemen at a very snug little dinner at the Haresfoot Club. Nor was pipe-clay wanting. The story of the plot, the intended character to be assumed by Mr. Pontifex, had been talked over at Woolwich, at Brompton,--where the sucking Indian heroes, men whose names long afterwards were household words during the Mutiny campaigns, were learning soldiering,--at the Senior and the Junior, and at the Rag, the members of which, awaiting the completion of their present palatial residence, then occupied a modest tenement in St. James's Square. There was a boxful of Plungers, big, solemn, heavy men, with huge curling moustaches, conspicuous among whom were Algy Forrester and Cis Hetherington of the Blues; Markham Bowers of the Life Guards, who shot the militia-surgeon behind the windmill at Wimbledon; and Dick Edie of the 4th Dragoon Guards--Dick Edie, the solicitor's son, who afterwards ran away with Lady Florence Ormolu, third daughter of the house of Porphyry; and on being reconciled and introduced to whom on a future occasion, the Dowager Countess of Porphyry was good enough to make the remark that she "had no idea the lower orders were so clean."