before my servant Summers--a quick fellow, you know, who has travelled with me from Norway to Nubia--had quitted his seat and got into the house, into which I followed him with a step, you dog, as active as your own! Egad! I was twenty-one then! Two fellows had already knocked down poor Summers, and showed plenty of fight. Do you know," said the marquis, interrupting himself with an air of serio-comic humiliation-- "do you know that I actually--no, you never will believe it; mind, 't is a secret--actually broke my cane over one fellows shoulders? Look!" (and the marquis held up the fragment of the lamented weapon). "And I half suspect, but I can't say positively, that I had even the necessity to demean myself by a blow with the naked hand,--clenched too! Quite Eton again; upon my honor it was! Ha, ha!" And the marquis--whose magnificent proportions, in the full vigor of man's strongest, if not his most combative, age, would have made him a formidable antagonist even to a couple of prize-fighters, supposing he had retained a little of Eton skill in such encounters--laughed with the glee of a schoolboy, whether at the thought of his prowess; or his sense of the contrast between so rude a recourse to primitive warfare, and his own indolent habits and almost feminine good temper. Composing himself, however, with the quick recollection how little I could share his hilarity, he resumed gravely, "It took us some time, I don't say to defeat our foes, but to bind them, which I thought a necessary precaution; one fellow, Trevanion's servant, all the while stunning me with quotations from Shakspeare. I then gently laid hold of a gown, the bearer of which had been long trying to scratch me, but being, luckily, a small woman, had not succeeded in reaching to my eyes. But the gown escaped, and fluttered off to the kitchen. I followed, and there I found Miss Trevanion's Jezebel of a maid. She was terribly frightened, and affected to be extremely penitent. I own to you that I don't care what a man says in the way of slander, but a woman's tongue against another woman,--especially if that tongue be in the mouth of a lady's lady,--I think it always worth silencing; I therefore consented to pardon this woman on condition she would find her way here before morning. No scandal shall come from her. Thus you see some minutes elapsed before I joined you; but I minded that the less as I heard you and the Captain were already in the room with Miss Trevanion. And not, alas! dreaming of your connection with the culprit, I was wondering what could have delayed you so long,--afraid, I own it, to find that Miss Trevanion's heart might have been seduced by that--hem, hem!--handsome-- young--hem, hem--There's no fear of that?" added Lord Castleton, anxiously, as he bent his bright eyes upon mine.