you have not told me anything about yourself, except apropos of punning."
"Come up and dine, and we'll fire away personal histories, broadside for broadside! I've been looking in vain for a worthy hero to set vis-à-vis to my fair kinswoman. But stop! perhaps you have a Christmas turkey at home, with a wife opposite, and a brace of boys waiting for drumsticks."
"No,—my boys, like cherubs, await their own drumsticks. They're not born, and I'm not married."
"I thought you looked incomplete and abnormal. Well, I will show you a model wife,—and here she comes!"
Here they came, the two ladies, gliding round the Point, with draperies floating as artlessly artful as the robes of Raphael's Hours, or a Pompeian Bacchante. For want of classic vase or patera, Miss Damer brandished Peter Skerrett's pocket-pistol.
Fanny Skerrett gave her hand cordially to Wade, and looked a little anxiously at his pale face.
"Now, M. D.," says Peter, "you have been surgeon, you shall be doctor and dose our patient.
Now, then,—
'Hebe, pour free!
Quicken his eyes with mountain-dew,
That Styx, the detested,
No more he may view.'"
"Thanks, Hebe!"
Wade said, continuing the quotation,—
"I quaff it!
Io Pæan, I cry!
The whiskey of the Immortals
Forbids me to die."
