Upon the necessity and expediency of now dining, however, we were all unanimously agreed: the difficulty was how to achieve it. Mr. and Mrs. H. had a pigeon-hole for their only habitation, in which it would have been perfectly impossible to have introduced a table; a single chair was all it was capable of containing. In our rooms we had some difficulty in turning round when more than one person at a time was in them; but by dint of sitting _out_ of the window, and against the door, and upon all the boxes, we had, I was assured--for I actually did not remember it--ingeniously succeeded in getting some breakfast--but to dine was perfectly impracticable. There happened, however, to be in this very hotel, a Captain F., an idle, not a fighting, captain; one who made his campaigns, not at Waterloo, but in Bond-street; and this Captain F., who had been in Antwerp long before the commencement of hostilities, had, luckily for us, got possession of a room in which it was possible to move. He was a Newmarket friend of Mr. H.'s, who introduced him to us, with the recommendation that he was a young man of fashion and fortune, well known about town; and in Captain F.'s room and company, Mr. and Mrs. H., my sister, my brother, and I accordingly dined; we were also favoured with the company of a particular friend of his, a Mr. C. Many foolish young men it has been my lot to see, but never did I meet with any whose folly was at all comparable to that of Captain F. Captain F. was a young man who prided himself upon his knowledge of horse-flesh, and who had, by his own account, been jockeyed out of "many a cool thousand" by his ignorance of it; he was a young man who delighted in building more _new invented_ carriages in one year than he could pay for in twenty; he was a young man who prided himself upon borrowing money from Jews at fifteen per cent. while his guardians were saving it for him at five; and in squandering it at Newmarket while they thought him poring over Greek and mathematics at Cambridge; he was a young man whose highest pride consisted in driving four-in-hand "knowingly;" whose greatest ambition was to resemble a stage-coachman exactly, and whose distinguishing characteristic was that of being a most egregious fool. In consequence, I suppose, of a perseverance in this laudable career, Captain F. now found it more convenient to play the fool upon the continent than in England. After recounting to us various and manifold deeds of folly committed in London and Newmarket, amongst Jews and Whip Clubs, he at length gravely asserted, "that it was impossible for any man to dress under seven hundred a year." This piece of information was received by some of the party with equal amazement and incredulity: but Captain F. assured us, "'Pon his soul it was true; that he knew as well as any man what it was to dress, and that it could not be done for less than seven hundred a year--nay, that it often costs nine."