About a fortnight after this I received letters from Mr Peter Brail, my uncle in Liverpool, offering me a share in the firm, and enjoining me, if I accepted it, to return immediately, without visiting Jamaica. He also stated that he had written his Kingston correspondents, with instructions as to some business that I was to have transacted, had I, as originally intended, gone thither; and mentioned to them, at the same time, the probable change in my plans. This was too favourable an offer to be declined; I therefore made up my mind to close with it; but, as I could not wind up my Havanna transactions for some time, I determined to spend the interim as pleasantly as possible. Two days afterwards I was invited to make one in a cruise into the country. Accordingly, the following morning we were all prepared to set off to visit Mr Hudson's estate; it was about five in the morning--we had packed up--the volantes and horses were already at the door, and Mrs Hudson, her daughter Helen, with Dicky Phantom, once more in his little kilt of a frock, in her hand; Sophie Duquesné, De Walden, Mr Hudson, and myself, all spurred and whipped, if not all booted, were ready in the vestibule, waiting by candle-light for Mr Listado, who was also to be of the party. Gradually the day broke, and as the servants were putting out the candles, in compliment to Aurora's blushes, in trundled our Hibernian friend, with his usual boisterosity. "Hope I haven't kept you waiting, Mr Hudson?--that villain Palotinto, the black warehouseman, store _nigger_"--with a wink to me--"as you would call him in New York,"--Mr Hudson laughed good-naturedly--"got drunk, and be fiddled to him--never swear before ladies, Brail--and forgot to call me; and when he did wake me, he could not find my spurs, and the mule's bridle was amissing, and the devil knows what all had gone wrong; so I was bothered entirely--but here I am, my charmers, large as life, and as agreeable as ever--don't you think so, Miss Hudson?" She laughed; and as the blundering blockhead dragged, rather than handed her towards her volante, I felt a slight comical kind of I don't-know-what, and a bit of a tiny flutter, not a thousand miles from my heart.--"Ho, ho," thought I, Benjie. "But what an ass you were not to hand her out your----. Death and the devil, what does the mouldy potato mean?"--continued I to myself, as Listado, after fumbling to get the step of the New-York built voiture out, and knocking the Moreno, or brown driver, down on his nose for attempting to help him, desecrated the sweet little body's slender waist with his rough arms, and actually lifted her, laughing and giggling (_skirling_, to borrow from Lennox), bodily into the carriage.