sometimes a pen, now and then a penknife, and very often a toothpick. These gentlemen came down to the steamer at the last moment, inspiring the minds of nervous passengers with supernatural and convulsive cheerfulness by the light and airy way in which they bade adieu to the comrades who had just looked round to see them start, and who made appointments with them for Christmas supper-parties, and booked bets with them for next year's Newmarket first spring—as if such things as shipwreck, peril by sea, heeling over Royal Georges, lost Presidents, with brilliant Irish comedians setting forth on their return to the land in which they had been so beloved and admired, never, never to reach the shore, were things that could not be. There were rosy-cheeked country lasses, going over to earn fabulous wages and marry impossibly rich husbands. There were the old people, who essayed this long journey on an element which they knew only by sight, in answer to the kind son's noble letter, inviting them to come and share the pleasant home his sturdy arm had won far away in the fertile West. There were stout Irish labourers armed with pickaxe and spade, as with the best sword wherewith to open the great oyster of the world in these latter degenerate days. There was the distinguished American family, with ever so many handsomely dressed, spoiled, affectionate children clustering round papa and mamma, and having their own way, after the manner of transatlantic youth. There were, in short, all the people who usually assemble when a good ship sets sail for the land of dear brother Jonathan; but the Count de Marolles there was not.
No, decidedly, no Count de Marolles! There was a very quiet-looking Irish labourer, keeping quite aloof from the rest of his kind, who were sufficiently noisy and more than sufficiently forcible in the idiomatic portions of their conversation. There was this very quiet Irishman, leaning on his spade and pickaxe, and evidently bent on not going on board till the very last moment; and there was an elderly gentleman in a black coat, who looked rather like a Methodist parson, and who held a very small carpet-bag in his hand; but there was no Count de Marolles; and what's more, there was no Mr. Peters.
This latter circumstance made Augustus Darley very uneasy; but I regret to say that the Smasher wore, if anything, a look of triumph as the hands of the clocks about the quay pointed to three o'clock, and no Peters appeared.
"I knowed," he said, with effusion—"I knowed that cove wasn't up to his business. I wouldn't mind bettin' the goodwill of my little crib in London agen sixpen'orth of coppers, that he's a-standin' at this very individual moment of time at a street-corner a mile off, makin' signs to one of the Liverpool police-officers."
The gentleman in the black coat standing before them turned
