prodigious accumulation of trash—stays, I daresay, and powder-puffs, and such effeminate idiocy—to which none could dispute his title, even suppose any one wanted to. We had a perfect right to bid him go, and he had a perfect right to reply, 'Yes, I will go, but not without my stays and cravats. I must first get together the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine chestsfull of insufferable rubbish, that I have spent the last thirty years collecting—and may very well spend the next thirty hours a-packing of.' And what should we have said to that?"
"By way of repartee?" I asked. "Two tall footmen and a pair of crabtree cudgels, I suggest."
"The lord deliver me from the wisdom of laymen!" cried Romaine. "Put myself in the wrong at the beginning of a law-suit? No, indeed! There was but one thing to do, and I did it, and burned my last cartridge in the doing of it. I stunned him. And it gave us three hours, by which we should make haste to profit; for if there is one thing sure, it is that he will be up to time again to-morrow in the morning."
"Well," said I, "I own myself an idiot. Well do they say, an old soldier, an old innocent! For I guessed nothing of all this."
"And, guessing it, have you the same objections to leave England?" he inquired.
"The same," said I.
"It is indispensable," he objected.
"And it cannot be," I replied. "Reason has nothing to say in the matter; and I must not let you squander any of yours. It will be enough to tell you this is an affair of the heart."
"Is it even so?" quoth Romaine, nodding his head. "And I might have been sure of it. Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in yellow overalls, do what you
