Nothing could possibly be more attentive than he was during the entire detail. He leaned his head on his hand, and listened with eager curiosity to all my scrapes and difficulties, occasionally nodding in assent, and now evincing by his excited air his desire to learn farther; and when I at last wound up by avowing my long cherished desire to enter the French service, he sat perfectly silent, and seemed to reflect gravely on the whole. “I say, Tom,” said he, at length, as he stared me full in the face, and laid his hand impressively on my knee, “there 's good stuff in that,--excellent stuff, depend upon it.” “Good stuff! what do you mean?” said I, in amazement. “I mean,” replied he, “there's bone in it, sinew in it, substance in it; there are some admirable situations too. How Fulham would come out in Tony Basset,--brown shorts, white stockings, high shoes and buckles, his own very costume. And there's that little thing, Miss Booth, for Nelly; give her a couple of songs,--ballad airs take best. Williams should be Barton; a devilish fine villain in coarse parts, Williams,--I think I see him stealing along by the flats with his soldiers to the attack. Then the second act should open: interior of hut; peasants round a table (eating always successful on the stage; nothing like seeing a fat fellow bolting hard eggs, and blustering out unpronounceable jokes over a flagon of colored water). You, by right, should have your own part; splendid thing, devilish fine,--your sensations when the cabin was on tire, and the fellows were prodding about with their bayonets to discover you.” “And who 's to perform Captain Bubbleton?” asked I, venturing for once to humor his absurdity. “Eh? Oh I there's nothing for me; no marked feature, nothing strong, nothing characteristic. That has been through life my greatest, my very highest ambition,--that no man should ever detect, by anything in my manner, my dress, or my style of conversation, that I was not John Nokes or Peter Styles. You 'll meet me at a dinner party, Tom; you 'll converse with me, drink with me; we'll sit the evening together, grow intimate, perhaps you 'll borrow fifty pounds of me; and yet I 'd wager another, you'd never guess that I rode a hippopotamus across the Ganges after tiffin one day, to pay my respects to the Governor-Greneral. That, let me tell you, Tom, is the very proudest boast a man can make. Do you see that scar? It looks nothing now. That was a bite from a ferocious boa: the villain got into my room before breakfast; he had eaten my chokeedar, a fellow I was very fond of--” “Ah, I remember you mentioned that to me. And now to come back to my dull story, to which, I assure you, however dramatic you may deem it, I 'd prefer adding an act or so before it comes before the world. I intend to leave this to-morrow.”