So the drummer beats the charge or the chamade -the advance or the retreat. I myself think that the band of the Royal Horse Guards Blue, at the Chiswick Flower Show, had the best of it. When their labour was over they enjoyed gratuitous cold meats and beer, and the band-master shared between them a handsome donative.

CHAPTER III.

NURSE PIGOT T.

THE Chiswick festival came to an end, and the company departed. Griffin Blunt lingered to the last, and wound his way to the door of egress, through a silken labyrinth of polite conversations and bowing adieux. Ivanhoff's last aria, and Malibran's last cadence; Prince Esterhazy's last conversazione, and the Duke of Devonshire's last ball at Brighton; the odds for the St. Leger, the beauties of drawn tulle bonnets; taste and the musical glasses-without Shakspeare—had each their graceful mention, as Blunt fluttered in and about the parterres of beauty and fashion. The scene at the gate was like the crush-room at the

Opera, only with mellow sunlight turned on, instead of garish gas-like the "pin" at St. James's without the trains and plumes. The company had begun to yawn. Even Fashion is not exempt from the laws of fatigue; and perhaps one reason why great people grow tired of one another, is that they see one another so frequently—the endurable world being so extremely small.

Mr. Blunt had divers offers of conveyance to town. He might have continued a Squire of Dames to the last, and sat behind the most expensively jobbed horses in the metropolis. But he courteously declined all such proposals. He had a little business to transact, he said, and he was everybody's humble and devoted servant. He remained, however, chatting, bowing, smiling, until the crush grew thin, until the shamefaced people who had come down in glass-coaches and hackneys took heart of grace and bade the red jackets summon their hired vehicles, and until one or two attachés of foreign legations, and hardened Guardsmen, kindled their cigars before strolling away. In justice to them it must be admitted, that even these offenders peeped round to see there were no ladies near. Now-a-days, shame

and the smoker have been hopelessly divorced. So far from hesitating as to lighting a cigar in a lady's presence, the worshipper of nicotine wellnigh presumes to ask Beauty for a Vesuvian. A qui la faute? Is Beauty or Boeotia to blame?

The trees of Chiswick were bathed in crimson and burnished gold, and cast shadows of deepest purple, before Blunt himself ventured to light his cigar. When he began to smoke, he smoked vigorously, and as he walked away with a firm hasty tread, the white wreaths of vapour circling behind him, his gait seemed very different from that of the mincing tripping exquisite of half an hour ago. Had you had Fortunatus's cap, or had you been in the receipt of fern seed, you might have availed yourself of the privilege of invisibility, trodden on his varnished heel-marked how nervously he turned and started, although he had but scrunched a pebble-and then, looking in his face, have discovered, not without amazement, that his face was as the face of an old man.

Terribly jaded, haggard, and careworn. A film seemed to have come over the eyes. No silver, but a rust rather, mingled with the jetty hair and whiskers. And the smile had fled away from the

mouth, and left only furrows of cruelty and hardness there.

He struck into a by-lane, green and solitary as though it had been fifty miles from London, and walking rapidly, soon came upon a mean little wayside tavern, all thatch and ivy and honeysuckle, and with the sign of the Goat swinging before it. He passed through the bar, where two market gardeners sprawled over their pipes and beer on a bench-one, awake and uproarious; the other, asleep and snoring; both as happy, doubtless, as the Great Mogul. He turned to a little side-window, and in the most unaffected manner in the world ordered a glass of brandy. He, order brandy! Nevertheless, he not only did order brandy, but drank it without flinching; and, what is still more singular, paid for it-a performance to which he was, to say the least, unaccustomed. However, this was to be for Mr. Blunt an evening unusually marked by the disbursement of ready money.

"There is a person here with a child,” he said, less asking a question than asserting something of which he entertained no doubt.

"In the parlour, sir," the landlady replied, with