It has seemed necessary to give this lecture upon resolutions, because Colonel Manners very speedily found cause to abandon the determination which he formed so vigorously on the day we spoke of in the last chapter; and, that he might not be charged with inconsistency, it became requisite to enter into all those strict definitions and explanations that generally leave us as many loopholes for escape and evasion, as a treaty of peace or a deed of settlement. One resolution, however, and one promise, Colonel Manners certainly did keep, as soon as it was possible, which was, to inquire whether the gipsies were still in the neighbourhood, and to seek them out, with the full purpose of having his fortune told. Now, it may be supposed that here was a little weakness on the part of Colonel Manners--that he did give some credit to gipsy chiromancy; nay, the reader may even push his conjectures farther, and imagine him dreaming of Isadore Falkland's beautiful eyes, and all their varieties of expression, from the deep and soft to the gayest sparkle that ever twinkled through two rows of long silky eyelashes. But the simple fact was, that he had promised to go, and that he went; and though he might think Miss Falkland extremely beautiful and extremely pleasing, as every man who had been two minutes in her company must have thought, he no more dreamed of the possibility of so fair a creature, courted and loved as he knew she must be, ever uniting herself to so ugly a man as himself--and as he sat and shaved himself that morning he thought himself uglier than ever--than Napoleon Bonaparte, in the plenitude of power and the majesty of victory, thought of a low grave beneath a willow on a rock in the Atlantic. In regard to any belief in the gipsies' fortune-telling, there were little use of investigating closely, whether some thin fibre of the root of superstition had or had not been left in the bosom of Charles Manners. If any particle thereof did remain, it went no farther than to excite, perhaps, a slight degree of curiosity in regard to what the people would predict, more, perhaps, from feeling that it must be absurd, than from expecting any point of coincidence with his real fate; and certain it is that, whatever the gipsies might have told to Colonel Manners, he would have thought no more of after the immediate moment, except as a matter for jest, than he would of any other kind of _sortes_, whether drawn from Virgil or Joe Miller.