430 THE KING ; GOD BLESS HIM f 



in hand. He told his tale, aided by the mute eloquence of the 

 castor ; and, in consequence, being then little past the age of thirty, 

 actually attained the highly important, responsible, and profitable 

 post of a non-rated midshipman on board a ship of war, whence he 

 has since, haply, retired to enjoy, otium cum dignitate, on the strength 

 of his official pension Nothing-a-day, and find himself!" 



<e The bottle stands with you, my friend," observed the soldier ; 

 ft the night wears ; the lamp is dull as the Royal Society ; the fire 

 about as sparkling and lively as a fashionable novel ; let us, on the 

 principle of Dr. Haneurann's homespathic system, avert the blues, 

 by the blues. In charity proceed" 



" There was, as I mentioned, but one stone house in the town of 

 Halifax ; and it was the pride and wonder of its people, who formed 

 a faint idea of the tower of London, by comparing it with the superior 

 structure of Mr. Bulkeley. Its tenant bore the same relation to his 

 fellow-citizens, as his lapideous mansion to their boarded dwellings. 

 How he came there I never could divine. He had been an officer in 

 the Horse Guards, in the reign of George the Second ; was a scholar 

 and a gentleman, such as were gentlemen in that day, and is the 

 author of ' Whistlecraft ' in ours ; his manners of the school of Ches- 

 terfield ; his mind enlarged, and his feelings kindly. With these, 

 his cast off military accoutrements (and often have I gazed in the 

 age of pointed toes with awful reverence on the square projection of 

 his soled boots), and bag, sword, and ruffles, he had sate him down 

 on the barren and rude shores of Nova Scotia, living on the recollec- 

 tion of Kensington and Hampton Court, Gunnersbury House and 

 Leicester-fields, Bubb Doddington, and other things of high and 

 remote antiquity. But neither boots or ruffles, Kensington or Bubb j 

 Doddington, could save his windows from the nightly assault. The 

 unfrequented space between his house and the wooden church of St. 

 Paul, was admirably adapted for the purpose of vitreous crime ; 

 watchmen and lamps were of as much repute there as a theatre or 

 circulating library glorious execution was made of his panes, and 

 his squares were reduced to geometrical forms, which it would have 

 puzzled Wellington himself to describe; that suspicion fell on the mid- 

 shipmen it would be wrong to declare, for it was clear as the smashed 

 panes that it was they and no others; their full and exclusive title 

 to running cords across the streets, to reduce mortal bearing from a 

 perpendicular to a horizontal position ringing the fire-bell to the 

 nervous derangement of the town sleighing it down the steep hill of 

 Halifax, of a moonlight night, with some unlucky old womanen trapped, 

 on their wicked knees and other eccentricities had been long and 

 decidedly established. Fun over (for let the grave sneer, and 

 the moralists denounce'as they will, fun it was, and is, and will be, at a 

 certain tide of life) fun over, full and fitting recompence was the 

 next day tendered, to the old soldier and courtier, by the reefers' 

 chancellor of the exchequer, in the person of their captain. " I pray, 

 sir," said Mr. Bulkeley, with tone and gesture, which would have 

 thrown Sir Robert Chester's for ever in the shade " you will not 

 pain me, by mention of the panes. Were it permitted me to hope, 

 and haply the idea is not extravagant, that the son of my excellent 



