itive rush into an Englishman's
house, beseeching protection, and appealing to the master's feelings of
hospitality, the Englishman would knock him down in the passage."

"You are too general," said I, "in your strictures; Lord ---, {484} the
unpopular Tory minister, was once chased through the streets of London by
a mob, and, being in danger of his life, took shelter in the shop of a
Whig linen-draper, declaring his own unpopular name, and appealing to the
linen-draper's feelings of hospitality; whereupon, the linen-draper,
utterly forgetful of all party rancour, nobly responded to the appeal,
and telling his wife to conduct his lordship upstairs, jumped over the
counter with his ell in his hand, and placing himself with half a dozen
of his assistants at the door of his _boutique_, manfully confronted the
mob, telling them that he would allow himself to be torn to a thousand
pieces, ere he would permit them to injure a hair of his lordship's head;
what do you think of that?"

"He! he! he!" tittered the man in black.

"Well," said I, "I am afraid your own practice is not very different from
that which you have been just now describing; you sided with the radical
in the public-house against me, as long as you thought him the most
powerful, and then turned against him, when you saw he was cowed. What
have you to say to that?"

"Oh! when one is in Rome, I mean England, one must do as they do in
England, I was merely conforming to the custom of the country, he! he!
but I beg your pardon here, as I did in the public-house. I made a
mistake."

"Well," said I, "we will drop the matter, but pray seat yourself on that
stone, and I will sit down on the grass near you."

The man in black, after proffering two or three excuses for occupying
what he supposed to be my seat, sat down upon the stone, and I squatted
down gypsy fashion, just opposite to him, Belle sitting on her stool at a
slight distance on my right. After a time I addressed him thus: "Am I to
reckon this a mere visit of ceremony? Should it prove so, it will be, I
believe, the first visit of the kind ever paid me."

"Will you permit me to ask," said the man in black--"the weather is very
warm," said he, interrupting himself, and taking off his hat.

I now observed that he was partly bald, his red hair having died away
from the fore part of his crown; his forehead was high, his eyebrows
scanty, his eyes grey and sly, with a downward tendency, his nose was
sl