might we recite the whole fable. Away with him--not a
word! I never saw the pianofortes in the United States with the frilled
muslin trousers on their legs; but, depend on it, the muslin covered
some of the notes as well as the mahogany, muffled the music, and
stopped the player.

To what does this prelude introduce us? I am thinking of Harry
Warrington, Esquire, in his lodgings in Bond Street, London, and of the
life which he and many of the young bucks of fashion led in those times,
and how I can no more take my faire young reader into them, than
Lady Squeams can take her daughter to Cremorne Gardens on an ordinary
evening. My dear Miss Diana (psha! I know you are eight-and-thirty,
although you are so wonderfully shy, and want to make us believe
you have just left off schoolroom dinners and a pinafore), when your
grandfather was a young man about town, and a member of one of the clubs
at White's, and dined at Pontac's off the feasts provided by Braund and
Lebeck, and rode to Newmarket with March and Rockingham, and toasted
the best in England with Gilly Williams and George Selwyn (and didn't
understand George's jokes, of which, indeed, the flavour has very much
evaporated since the bottling)--the old gentleman led a life of which
your noble aunt (author of Legends of the Squeams's; or, Fair Fruits of
a Family Tree) has not given you the slightest idea.

It was before your grandmother adopted those serious views for which
she was distinguished during her last long residence at Bath, and after
Colonel Tibbalt married Miss Lye, the rich soap-boiler's heiress, that
her ladyship's wild oats were sown. When she was young, she was as giddy
as the rest of the genteel world. At her house in Hill Street, she had
ten card-tables on Wednesdays and Sunday evenings, except for a short
time when Ranelagh was open on Sundays. Every night of her life she
gambled for eight, nine, ten hours. Everybody else in society did the
like. She lost; she won; she cheated; she pawned her jewels; who knows
what else she was not ready to pawn, so as to find funds to supply her
fury for play? What was that after-supper duel at the Shakspeare's Head
in Covent Garden, between your grandfather and Colonel Tibbalt: where
they drew swords and engaged only in the presence of Sir John Screwby,
who was drunk under the table? They were interrupted by Mr. John
Fielding's people, and your grandfather was carried home to Hill Street
wounded in a chair. I tell