"Console yourself, Daish," said our hero with an incredibly magnanimous air, "you are not to blame. You must know, Daish, that for a long time past I have had a curiosity to survey this small green earth, unhampered by anything more serious than the impulse of the moment. To-night, Daish, when you retire to rest, when you gather the curtains of your serene bed, when you hark to the clock in the passage striking the moderate and orderly hour of ten o'clock, when you reflect with a sigh of proprietary contentment that you have offended no one in the course of an innkeeper's promiscuous day, when, in a word, your respectable head sinks into your respectable pillow, dally for a moment in the imagination of Charles Lovely and Anthony Clare mocking society, laughing at convention, seated in the parlour of some remote inn and dozing gratefully before a pile of logs. "Think of us, Daish, in the cool dusks and azure silences of April, at the top of some gentle hill whence we can regard with exhilaration the prospect of a good dinner, a crimson glass, and genial intercourse with travellers. Behold us in your mind's eye, walking our horses down through the twilight, as one by one in cottage lattices the candles twinkle and, high above, the stars betray the night with silver spears. For my part, already I can hear the evening gossip of housewives, and the babble of children in small gardens, and clear against the green West, I can see the many lovers of a little town moving with slow steps along their customary path. "Thus, my excellent Daish, each solemn nightfall will discover for us a new world, and, when the sun rises on the merry unknown streets of our pilgrimage, we shall think to ourselves what a vast number of jolly people exist in this remarkably jolly world. Oddslife--"Mr. Lovely broke off--"what a surprizing alliance." As he looked out of the window, we had better look out of the window too, and I think you will be quite disposed to agree with Charles when I show you that vivid yellow chaise drawn by two fiery chestnut horses, and driven by that extraordinarily diminutive coachman, for inside are seated Beau Ripple and the Widow Courteen, and neither you nor I nor anybody else ever saw both so nearly disconcerted. "Now what the deuce can be the meaning of that?" continued Mr. Lovely. "Of what you were saying?" inquired Mr. Daish in a deprecating voice. "The horses! the horses!" was all that Mr. Lovely saw fit to reply. Major Tarry's earlier progress might well have been the meteor which heralds a cataclysm, for cataclysm this later apparition certainly was. I vow the noise of conversation it caused far exceeded anything of the sort that was ever known. The Beau found the publicity of such an exit unendurable to his polite soul. That his sacred chaise, which had once bowled along at a high but decorous speed in order to meet the H--r A---- t of Great Britain, should achieve such a vulgar notoriety nearly upset the sit of his waistcoat.