How should I know?

Wasn't I dead drunk with a whole pint of lemonade I took at White's?

The Norfolk folk had been entertaining me on Tuesday with the account of
a young savage Iroquois, Choctaw, or Virginian, who has lately been
making a little noise in our quarter of the globe. He is an offshoot of
that disreputable family of Esmond-Castlewood, of whom all the men are
gamblers and spendthrifts, and all the women--well, I shan't say the
word, lest Lady Ailesbury should be looking over your shoulder. Both the
late lords, my father told me, were in his pay, and the last one, a beau
of Queen Anne's reign, from a viscount advanced to be an earl through
the merits and intercession of his notorious old sister Bernstein, late
Tusher, _nee_ Esmond--a great beauty, too, of her day, a favourite of
the old Pretender. She sold his secrets to my papa, who paid her for
them; and being nowise particular in her love for the Stuarts, came over
to the august Hanoverian house at present reigning over us. "Will Horace
Walpole's tongue never stop scandal?" says your wife over your shoulder.
I kiss your ladyship's hand. I am dumb. The Bernstein is a model of
virtue. She had no good reasons for marrying her father's chaplain. Many
of the nobility omit the marriage altogether. She _wasn't_ ashamed of
being Mrs. Tusher, and didn't take a German _Baroncino_ for a second
husband, whom nobody out of Hanover ever saw. The Yarmouth bears no
malice. Esther and Vashti are very good friends, and have been cheating
each other at Tunbridge at cards all the summer.

"And what has all this to do with the Iroquois?" says your ladyship. The
Iroquois has been at Tunbridge, too--not cheating, perhaps, but winning
vastly. They say he has bled Lord March of thousands--Lord March, by
whom so much blood hath been shed, that he has quarrelled with
everybody, fought with everybody, rode over everybody, been fallen in
love with by everybody's wife except Mr. Conway's, and _not_ excepting
her present Majesty, the Countess of England, Scotland, France and
Ireland, Queen of Walmoden and Yarmouth, whom heaven preserve to us.

You know an offensive little creature _de par le monde_, one Jack
Morris, who skips in and out of all the houses of London. When we were
at Vauxhall, Mr. Jack gave us a nod under the shoulder of a pretty young
fellow enough, on whose arm he was leaning, and who appeared hugely
delighted with the enchantments of the garden. Lord, how he stared a