"There ain't a man present as would be more free, gentlemen," said the landlord, "if I could; but, I put it to the company, with the present fall off in my trade, am I able?" "No--no!" was chorused; and, the glasses being filled, Jonathan Chunt proposed a toast which was drunk with acclamation, and the landlord's toast was: "Gentlemen, here's to happier times!" End of Book I. Book 2, Chapter I. AFTER TWENTY YEARS. "You dog! you confounded lubber! Drive on, or you'll have them out of sight!" shouted a frank, opened-faced young fellow of some three or four and twenty, as he leaned out of the front window of a post-chaise, and urged his post-boy to increase of speed. "An' how can I get another mile an hour out on such bastes, yer honner?" said the post-boy in answer. "The crayture I'm riding takes no more heed of the spur than the grate baste the levvyathan of Howly Scripture; and as to the blind mare there, the more I larrup her the more she hangs back out ov the collar." "Gammon!--nonsense!" cried the young man: "you can catch them if you like." "Shure, sor, I'd catch 'em if it was me. The spirit of me's been close alongside this last quarter of an hour; but the bastes here 'ave got skins like a rhinosros." "Half a guinea if you catch them and go by in the next two miles," shouted the traveller. "An why didn't ye spake sooner, sor? It's meself's the boy to get it out of the bastes if it's to be done at all;" and the effect of the golden spur was soon visible in the way in which the mire of the cross-country road flew up from the whirling wheels. For a couple of hours now, with the present and the preceding post-boy, had this chase been carried on,--now one chaise, now the other, being to the fore; the explanation of this being of the simplest character. Lieutenant Brace Norton, of H.M.S. "Icarus," had just arrived in port, and was, as he put it, homeward bound after his first voyage with the rank of lieutenant. In fact, he took so much pride in his epaulette, won after no end of midshipman's adventures, that, until better sense prevailed, he had had some thought of wearing it home. He had travelled as far as the county town by rail, and now, having a rather large idea of his own importance, was finishing his journey in one of the post-chaises--scarce things then--left upon the road. At the railway station he had twice encountered a fair young face, small, dark, oval, and with a pair of sad-looking, lustrous eyes, their owner leaning upon the arm of a tall, grey-haired gentleman; and after making his way to the hotel and ordering his conveyance, spending the time consumed in getting it ready by smoking a cigar, he was startled, upon going to the door to lounge about the steps, by seeing the same travellers take their places in a chaise which had been prepared before his own. "Do you know who that gentleman is?" he had said to the landlord, who had bowed his visitors to the door.