most public manner. The whole body of matrons looked round on their
blooming innocents, as if they had been snatched from the jaws of a
legion of wolves and thanked their own prudence which had not trusted
those men of mustaches within their hall doors. The blooming innocents
responded in filial gratitude, and, with whatever sincerity, thanked
their stars for their fortunate escape.

Still, the Earl's indignation was of so _ultra_ a quality; his revenge
was so fiery, and his tongue so fluent; that I began to suspect he had
other motives than the insulted laws of hospitality. I reached this
discovery, too, in time. The declining health of his partner had made
him speculate on the chances of survivorship. He certainly was no longer
young, and he had never been an Adonis. Yet his glass did not altogether
throw him into the rank of the impracticable. A coronet was a well-known
charm, which had often compensated for every other; in short, he had
quietly theorized himself into the future husband of the ducal ward; and
felt on this occasion as an Earl should, plundered, before his face, of
a clear twenty thousand a-year.

But he was not to suffer alone. On further enquiry, it was ascertained
that the chevalier's valet had not gone with him. This fellow, a
Frenchman, had taken wing in another direction, and carried off his
turtle-dove, too; not one of the full-blown roses of the servant's-hall,
but a rosebud, the daughter of one of the bulkiest squires of the
Riding; a man of countless beeves and blunders; one of our Yorkshire
Nimrods, "a mighty hunter," until club dinners and home-brewed ale tied
him to his arm-chair, and gout made him a man of peace and flannels, the
best thriven weed in the swamps of Yorkshire. The young lady had been
intended for my eldest brother, as a convenient medium of connexion
between two estates, palpably made for matrimony. Thus we received two
mortal blows in one evening; never was family pilfered more
ignominiously; never was amateur play more peevishly catastrophized.

It must be owned, to the credit of "private theatricals," that the play
had no slight share in the plot. The easy intercourse produced by
rehearsals, the getting of tender speeches by heart, the pretty
personalities and allusions growing out of those speeches, the ramblings
through shades and rose-twined parterres, the raptures and romance, all
tend prodigiously to take off the alarm, or instruct the inexperience,
of the female