“Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand be near us!” said the disquieted Madame Doppeldick to herself. “It is hard enough for people of our years and bulk to be obliged to lie double;--but to have a strange, wild, rakish, staring young fellow in the same chamber--I _do_ wish that Dietrich would make more haste with his supper, that we may get into bed first!” CHAPTER V. HONEST Dietrich was in no such hurry. A rational, moral, pious man, with a due grateful sense of the sapidity of certain gifts of the Creator, ought not to swallow them with the post-haste indifference of a sow swilling her wash; and as Dietrich Doppeldick did not taste oysters once in ten years, it was a sort of religious obligation, as well as a positive secular temptation, that the relish of each particular fish should be prolonged as far as possible on the palate by an orderly, decorous, and deliberate deglutition. Accordingly, instead of bolting the oysters as if he had been swallowing them for a wager, he sate soberly, with his eyes fixed on the two plumpest, as if only awaiting the “good-night” of his guest to do ample and Christian-like justice to the edible forget-me-nots of his good friend Adam Kloot. In vain his wife looked hard at him, and trod on his toes as long as she could reach them, besides being seized with a short hectic cough that was any thing but constitutional-- “Lord, help me!” said Mrs. Doppeldick in her soul, too fluttered to attend to the correctness of her metaphors--“It’s as easy to catch the eye of a post!--He minds me no more than if I trod on the toes of a stock-fish! I might as well cough into the ears of a stone wall.” In fact, honest Dietrich had totally forgotten the domestic dilemma. [Illustration: “KISSING GOES BY FAVOUR.”] “He will never take his eyes off,” thought Madame Doppeldick, stealing a glance across the table; “I was never so stared at, never since I was a girl and wore pigtails! I expect every moment he will jump and embrace me.” Whereas nothing could be further from the Captain’s thought. The second battalion had joined that very morning, and accordingly he had kissed, or been kissed by, all its eight-and-twenty officers, tall or short, fat or lean, fair or swarthy,--which was quite kissing enough for a reasonable day’s ration. The truth is, he was staring at himself. He had just, mentally, put on a new uniform, and was looking with the back of his eyes at his own brilliant figure, as a Captain in the Royal Guards. It was, however, a stare, outwardly, at Madame Doppeldick, who took everything to herself, frogs, lace, bullion, buttons, cuffs, collars, epaulettes, and the Deuce knows what besides. “I would to Heaven!” she wished, “he had never thought of going into the army,--or at least that the Quarter-master had never taken it into his stupid head to quarter him on us. Young gay Captains are very well to flirt with, or to waltz with, but at my years and bulk waltzing is quite out of the question!”