168 MORE COMMON INCIDENTS. 



sparkled beneath our feet. The naked trees spread their straggling 

 arms, whitened with rime, and sighed to the northern gale, which 

 swept beneath the cold blue sky. I began to be sentimental : 

 " Now, dearest Eliza," I exclaimed, as my arm was raised to encircle 

 her waist, " have your own arguments, aided by my unremitted cor- 

 respondence with your mother, had the effect of removing her scru- 

 ples to sanction an union, without which life and future prospects are 

 but as a blank to my" 



Here my effusion was interrupted by a noise resembling the fall 

 of some heavy body, followed by two consecutive sounds of incidental 

 and lighter projectiles, vehemently cast upon the turf. On turning 

 round, I beheld the Welch rascal to whom I had entrusted my 

 luggage, sprawling like a walrus ashore, with my portmanteaux a 

 little in advance of his carcase. The wretch had received orders to 

 go round to the mansion by the carriage-road, but having much 

 affected the appearance of a neat public-house, in a village that 

 skirted the park palings, over which I had trespassed, he had dallied 

 awhile with the inmates, and decided to follow my example, to make 

 up lost time. This was not the worst of it ; the fellow's assiduity 

 had been so exemplary, that he was beastly, mortally drunk. I 

 looked down in despair upon the disreputable vagabond, as he 

 struggled to recover his footing, and felt personally involved in the 

 disgrace. 



A horseman, accompanied by a servant in livery and two grey- 

 hounds, now came cantering in the distance, and Eliza ran to meet 

 them. I immediately followed, and shortly recognized my friend 

 and host ; the scene was soon explained to him ; his servant took 

 charge of my effects : and the bibulous transgressor was paid and 

 dismissed. 



After having transacted the indispensable to my toilet, I glimmered 

 into the drawing-room, and was there introduced toj the other visit- 

 ors. These consisted of a Mr. Groutledge, own brother to my 

 hostess, with his wife and two daughters, Iphigenia and Musidora. 

 Then followed the ' Heer ' Grave van Raven, a count of Belgico- 

 Dutch extraction. He was a sallow tall middle-aged man, sur- 

 mounted by a furiously wild chevelure, through the mazes of which, 

 he incessantly thrust the fingers of his left hand, divorced from each 

 other at right angles of twenty-five degrees. I scarcely know which 

 his hair best imitated, a collection of whale-bone shavings, or the 

 bristles of a porcupine imperfectly saturated with Hunt's matchless. 

 The hideous profusion of gloomy dismal reeds and rushes, sprung 

 out, in part, from a spongy parsnip-coloured forehead, most ruthlessly 

 dibbled by the small-pox. His eyes were strictly national. His 

 nose had apparently commenced its journey in classic conformity with 

 the noble Roman profile; but, after having described two-thirds of 

 the destined arc, there was an abrupt descent of the cartilage, in the 

 form of a valley, from which suddenly emerged a hillock, whose ob- 

 tuse apex enabled it to give expansion to a pair of nostrils, assimilating 

 in diameter, those of a Bellicose dray-horse. His upper lip and chin 

 had been decisively of surreptitious acquirement; either in the 

 shape of murder and theft, or a fore-closed mortgage on the person 

 of a Siamese baboon. 



