ed the
widow's heart as she pressed him to it! How faithfully did she instil
into his young bosom those principles which had been the pole-star of
the existence of his gallant father!

In this secluded retreat, rank and wealth almost boundless found the
widow and her boy. The seventeenth Earl--gallant and ardent, and in
the prime of youth--went forth one day from the Eternal City to a
steeple-chase in the Campagna. A mutilated corpse was brought back to
his hotel in the Piazza di Spagna. Death, alas! is no respecter of the
Nobility. That shattered form was all that remained of the fiery, the
haughty, the wild, but the generous Altamont de Pentonville! Such, such
is fate!

The admirable Emily de Pentonville trembled with all a mother's
solicitude at the distinctions and honors which thus suddenly descended
on her boy. She engaged an excellent clergyman of the Church of England
to superintend his studies; to accompany him on foreign travel when the
proper season arrived; to ward from him those dangers which dissipation
always throws in the way of the noble, the idle, and the wealthy. But
the Reverend Cyril Delaval died of the measles at Naples, and henceforth
the young Earl of Bagnigge was without a guardian.

What was the consequence? That, at three-and-twenty, he was a cynic and
an epicure. He had drained the cup of pleasure till it had palled in his
unnerved hand. He had looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps
without reverence. He was unmoved by the sandy solitudes of the Desert
as by the placid depths of Mediterranean's sea of blue. Bitter, bitter
tears did Emily de Pentonville weep, when, on Alured's return from the
Continent, she beheld the awful change that dissipation had wrought in
her beautiful, her blue-eyed, her perverted, her still beloved boy!

"Corpo di Bacco," he said, pitching the end of his cigar on to the red
nose of the Countess of Delawaddymore's coachman--who, having deposited
her fat ladyship at No. 236 Piccadilly, was driving the carriage to
the stables, before commencing his evening at the "Fortune of War"
public-house--"what a lovely creature that was! What eyes! what hair!
Who knows her? Do you, mon cher prince?"

"E bellissima, certamente," said the Duca de Montepulciano, and stroked
down his jetty moustache.

"Ein gar schones Madchen," said the Hereditary Grand Duke of
Eulenschreckenstein, and turned up his carroty one.

"Elle n'est pas mal, ma foi!" said the Prince de Borodin