best how to
preserve it for us. Two men in this house would give their wives for
pipes, if it came to the choice. We might all go for a cellar of old
wine. After forty, men have married their habits, and wives are only an
item in the list, and not the most important.'

With the assistance of Mr. Stukely Culbrett, Mrs. Lespel prepared the
house and those of the company who were in the secret of affairs for the
arrival of Beauchamp. The ladies were curious to see him. The gentlemen,
not anticipating extreme amusement, were calm: for it is an axiom in the
world of buckskins and billiard-cues, that one man is very like another;
and so true is it with them, that they can in time teach it to the fair
sex. Friends of Cecil Baskelett predominated, and the absence of so
sprightly a fellow was regretted seriously; but he was shooting with his
uncle at Holdesbury, and they did not expect him before Thursday.

On Wednesday morning Lord Palmet presented himself at a remarkably
well-attended breakfast-table at Itchincope. He passed from Mrs. Lespel
to Mrs. Wardour-Devsreux and Miss Halkett, bowed to other ladies, shook
hands with two or three men, and nodded over the heads of half-a-dozen,
accounting rather mysteriously for his delay in coming, it was thought,
until he sat down before a plate of Yorkshire pie, and said:

'The fact is I've been canvassing hard. With Beauchamp!'

Astonishment and laughter surrounded him, and Palmet looked from face to
face, equally astonished, and desirous to laugh too.

'Ernest! how could you do that?' said Mrs. Lespel; and her husband cried
in stupefaction, 'With Beauchamp?'

'Oh! it's because of the Radicalism,' Palmet murmured to himself. 'I
didn't mind that.'

'What sort of a day did you have?' Mr. Culbrett asked him; and several
gentlemen fell upon him for an account of the day.

Palmet grimaced over a mouthful of his pie.

'Bad!' quoth Mr. Lespel; 'I knew it. I know Bevisham. The only chance
there is for five thousand pounds in a sack with a hole in it.'

'Bad for Beauchamp? Dear me, no'; Palmet corrected the error. 'He is
carrying all before him. And he tells them,' Palmet mimicked Beauchamp,
'they shall not have one penny: not a farthing. I gave a couple of
young ones a shilling apiece, and he rowed me for bribery; somehow I did
wrong.'

Lord Palmet described the various unearthly characters he had inspected
in their dens: Carpendike, Tripehallow, and the radicals Peter Molyneux