Love that is long a-coming, comes at last with a terrible onset—overturning all sense and prudence, kicking up the heels of all forms of etiquette, and removing every impediment to its progress. It is but a very small matter to say, that Gustavus could not sleep under the hug or embrace of the new customer that had taken such a violent hold of his heart, though we do not deem it an equally insignificant announcement, that a man who could swallow a couple of pounds of flesh at a down-sitting, should lose his gustative and digestive powers to such an extent that the knocking of his heart sounded audibly through his empty stomach, as if it had been a whispering gallery. But love is a leveller in more senses than the vulgar one; and the only circumstance about the matter of this particular case at all remarkable, was, that such effects, upon a body iron-bound as it was, and of such gigantic proportions, should have been produced by an agent of such truly insignificant dimensions. A resolute disciplinarian, however, at all points, without a single qualm of fear or doubt, and accustomed to attack a city or a haunch of beef with equal _sang froid_, the love-smitten victim, on the third day after his seizure, drew up his huge limbs to their full extent, till he seemed like the Colossus of Rhodes, and settled the whole affair by one resolute gnash of his under maxillary bone. Two strides took him to the door, one or two more brought him down stairs to the street, and the never a man that stalked off ground that was to be his own, went along with such strides as he used in making his way to the house of Julia Briggs. With one solitary idea in his head, and one word on his tongue—though there was room for a thousand—he went direct up to the door, knocked, like one of Froissard’s warriors at the barricades, was admitted, turned off the momentous question of marriage by one heavy lurch of his jaw, and settled a matter that danglers take years about in the space of time that a thirsty Bacchanalian would occupy in taking a long pull of jolly good ale. CHAPTER III. GUSTAVUS IS MARRIED.