138 A BOOK ABOUT THE QABDEN. 



reward, partly in the fact that the handsome Guards- 

 man succeeded, against all expectation, to the head- 

 ship of his house a peerage, with large estates but 

 chiefly in his daughter's grateful love. 



We will leave him, if you please, as I once saw him, 

 and as ever since I have liked best to think of him, 

 plucking an orange for his grandchild, little Alice, 

 from the very tree whereupon grew the leaf. 



CHAPTER IX. 



MR. CHISWICK ON BEDDING-OUT. 



GENTLEMEN, Msop does not tell us whether thirteen 

 respectable frogs held a coroner's quest over the re- 

 mains (which must have been collected and arranged 

 with difficulty) of that ambitious brother who, 

 foolishly essaying to represent to his family the grand 

 proportions of the ox, induced a sudden disruption of 

 the cuticle, or, in the vulgar parlance, bust. If such 

 an inquiry was made, and the frogs, our esteemed 

 progenitors according to the Darwinian theory, may 

 probably have enjoyed, as we do, the rich blessing of 

 trial by jury, they could only have anticipated the 

 verdict which the colliers in a wild mining district 

 pronounced more recently upon a terrible virago who 

 had fallen down a shaft, with the assistance of her 

 husband to wit, that it "served her right." Although 

 the bereaved family the brothers and sisters, for any- 

 thing we know to the contrary, of the ill-fated flirt 



