y or a lap-dog; and several female servants left
the house on his account.

But Nemesis overtook him in the way we have hinted, and it put his
little black pipe out.

The lady had taken him out of great humanity; he was fed like a
game-cock, and dressed like a Barbaric prince; and once when he was ill
his mistress watched him, and nursed him, and tended him with the same
white hand that plied the obnoxious whip; and when he died, she alone
withheld her consent from his burial, and this gave him a chance black
boys never get, and he came to again; but still these tarnation lickings
"stuck in him gizzard." So when Sir Charles's agent proposed to him
certain silver coins, cheap at a little treachery, the ebony ape
grinned till he turned half ivory, and became a spy in the house of his
mistress.

The reader will have gathered that the good Sir Charles had been
quietly in London some hours before he announced himself as _paulo post
futurum._

Diamond cut diamond; a diplomat stole this march upon an actress, and
took her black pawn. One for Pomander! (Gun.)

CHAPTER IV.

TRIPLET, the Cerberus of art, who had the first bark in this legend,
and has since been out of hearing, ran from Lambeth to Covent Garden,
on receipt of Mr. Vane's note. But ran he never so quick, he had built a
full-sized castle in the air before he reached Bow Street.

The letter hinted at an order upon his muse for amatory verse;
delightful task, cheering prospect.

Bid a man whose usual lot it is to break stones for the parish at
tenpence the cubic yard--bid such an one play at marbles with some stone
taws for half an hour per day, and pocket one pound one--bid a poor
horse who has drawn those stones about, and browsed short grass by the
wayside--bid him canter a few times round a grassy ring, and then go
to his corn--in short, bid Rosinante change with Pegasus, and you do no
more than Mr. Vane's letter held out to Triplet.

The amatory verse of that day was not up-hill work. There was a
beaten track on a dead level, and you followed it. You told the tender
creature, with a world of circumlocution, that, "without joking now,"
she was a leper, ditto a tigress, item marble. You next feigned a lucid
interval, and to be on the point of detesting your monster, but in
twenty more verses love became, as usual, stronger than reason, and you
wound up your rotten yarn thus:

You hugged a golden chain. You drew deeper into your wound a barbed
shaft