Having had as much claret as they cared for, the gentlemen fluttered gaily into the drawing-room, and Puddock, who made up to Miss Gertrude, and had just started afresh, and in a rather more sentimental vein, was a good deal scandalised, and put out by the general's reciting with jolly emphasis, and calling thereto his daughter's special attention, his receipt for 'surprising a weaver,' which he embellished with two or three burlesque improvements of his own, which Puddock, amidst his blushes and confusion, allowed to pass without a protest. Aunt Rebecca was the only person present who pointedly refused to laugh; and with a slight shudder and momentary elevation of her eyes, said, 'wicked and unnatural cruelty!' at which sentiment Puddock used his pocket-handkerchief in rather an agitated manner. ''Tis a thing I've never done myself--that is, I've never seen it done,' said Little Puddock, suffused with blushes, as he pleaded his cause at the bar of humanity--for those were the days of Howard, and the fair sex had taken up the philanthropist. 'The--the--receipt--'tis, you see, a thing I happened to meet--and--and just read it in the--in a book--and the--I--a----' Aunt Becky, with her shoulders raised in a shudder, and an agonised and peremptory 'there, there, _there_,' moved out of hearing in dignified disgust, to the general's high entertainment, who enjoyed her assaults upon innocent Puddock, and indeed took her attacks upon himself, when executed with moderation, hilariously enough--a misplaced good-humour which never failed to fire Aunt Becky's just resentment. Indeed, the general was so tickled with this joke that he kept it going for the rest of the evening, by sly allusions and mischievous puns. As for instance, at supper, when Aunt Rebecca was deploring the miserable depression of the silk manufacture, and the distress of the poor Protestant artisans of the Liberty, the general, with a solemn wink at Puddock, and to that officer's terror, came out with-- 'Yet, who knows, Lieutenant Puddock, but the weavers, poor fellows, may be surprised, you know, by a sudden order from the Court, as happened last year.'