As the last thought passed through his brain, Bracebridge's little mustang slouched past the window, ridden (without a saddle) by a horseman whom there was no mistaking for no one but the immaculate colonel, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, dared to go about the country 'such a figure.' A minute afterwards he walked in, in a student's felt hat, a ragged heather-coloured coatee, and old white 'regulation drills,' shrunk half-way up his legs, a pair of embroidered Indian mocassins, and an enormous meerschaum at his button-hole. 'Where have you been this last week?' 'Over head and ears in Young England, till I fled to you for a week's common sense. A glass of cider, for mercy's sake, "to take the taste of it out of my mouth," as Bill Sykes has it.' 'Where have you been staying?' 'With young Lord Vieuxbois, among high art and painted glass, spade farms, and model smell-traps, rubricalities and sanitary reforms, and all other inventions, possible and impossible, for "stretching the old formula to meet the new fact," as your favourite prophet says.' 'Till the old formula cracks under the tension.' 'And cracks its devotees, too, I think. Here comes the cider!' 'But, my dear fellow, you must not laugh at all this. Young England or Peelite, this is all right and noble. What a yet unspoken poetry there is in that very sanitary reform! It is the great fact of the age. We shall have men arise and write epics on it, when they have learnt that "to the pure all things are pure," and that science and usefulness contain a divine element, even in their lowest appliances.' 'Write one yourself, and call it the Chadwickiad.' 'Why not? 'Smells and the Man I sing. There's a beginning at once. Why don't YOU rather, with your practical power, turn sanitary reformer--the only true soldier--and conquer those real devils and "natural enemies" of Englishmen, carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen?' 'Ce n'est pas mon metier, my dear fellow. I am miserably behind the age. People are getting so cursedly in earnest now-a-days, that I shall have to bolt to the backwoods to amuse myself in peace; or else sham dumb as the monkeys do, lest folks should find out that I'm rational, and set me to work.' Lancelot laughed and sighed. 'But how on earth do you contrive to get on so well with men with whom you have not an idea in common!' 'Savoir faire, O infant Hercules! own daddy to savoir vivre. I am a good listener; and, therefore, the most perfect, because the most silent, of flatterers. When they talk Puginesquery, I stick my head on one side attentively, and "think the more," like the lady's parrot. I have been all the morning looking over a set of drawings for my lord's new chapel; and every soul in the party fancies me a great antiquary, just because I have been retailing to B as my own everything that A told me the moment before.' 'I envy you your tact, at all events.'