o return. Byron reflected a moment,
and then declared he had restored it to me on the spot! I mildly but
firmly denied the fact; while his lordship as sturdily reasserted it.
In a short time, we were both in such a passion that Byron commanded
me to leave the room. I edged out of the apartment with the slow,
defying air of angry boyhood; but when I reached the door, I suddenly
turned, and looking at him with all the bitterness I felt for his
nation, called him, in French, "an English hog!" Till then our quarrel
had been waged in Italian. Hardly were the words out of my mouth when
his lordship leaped from the bed, and in the scantiest drapery
imaginable, seized me by the collar, inflicting such a shaking as I
would willingly have exchanged for a tertian ague from the Pontine
marshes. The sudden air-bath probably cooled his choler, for, in a few
moments, we found ourselves in a pacific explanation about the
luckless pencil. Hitherto I had not mentioned my uncle; but the moment
I stated the relationship, Byron became pacified and credited my
story. After searching his pockets once more ineffectually for the
lost _silver_, he presented me his own _gold_ pencil instead, and
requested me to say why I "cursed him _in French_?"

"My father was a Frenchman, my lord," said I.

"And your mother?"

"She is an Italian, sir."

"Ah! no wonder, then, you called me an 'English hog.' The hatred runs
in the blood; you could not help it."

After a moment's hesitation, he continued,--still pacing the apartment
in his night linen,--"You don't like the English, do you, my boy?"

"No," said I, "I don't."

"Why?" returned Byron, quietly.

"Because my father died fighting them," replied I.

"Then, youngster, you have _a right_ to hate them," said the poet, as
he put me gently out of the door, and locked it on the inside.

A week after, one of the porters of my uncle's warehouse offered to
sell, at an exorbitant price, what he called "Lord Byron's pencil,"
declaring that his lordship had presented it to him. My uncle was on
the eve of bargaining with the man, when he perceived his own initials
on the silver. In fact, it was my lost gift. Byron, in his
abstraction, had evidently mistaken the porter for myself; so the
servant was rewarded with a trifling gratuity, while my _virtuoso_
uncle took the liberty to appropriate the golden relic of Byron to
himself, and put me off with the humbler remembrance of his honored
name.

These, how