as if he had pronounced it _viva voce_; and before we parted for the
night, which did not occur until the sun was blazing through the
curtains of our banqueting room, I had made up my mind, once for all,
that neither character nor cunning can be concealed in this world; that
the craftiest impostor is but a clumsier kind of clown; and that the
most dexterous disguise is but a waste of time.

I must hasten to the _denouement_. Our excellent friends indulged us
with their company, and bored us with their society for a mortal week.
But, as Sterne says of the sentimental traveller, scenes of sentiment
are always exhibiting themselves to an appetite eager for knowing what
the world is doing; the knowledge was contributed with a copiousness
which left nothing to learn, and but little to desire. Our guests were
of that class which usually fills the houses of noblemen, in the
annihilation of life in town; clubmen, to whom St James's Street was the
terraqueous globe; guardsmen, on leave of absence for the shooting
season, and saturated with London; several older exhibitors in the
fashionable circles, who as naturally followed where young guardsmen and
wealthy squires were to be found, as flies wing to the honey on which
they live; and two or three of the most opulent and dullest baronets who
ever played whist and billiards, for the advantage of losing guinea
points to gentlemen more accomplished in the science of chances.

At length, on the sixth day, when I really began to feel anxious, an
express announced that his lordship had arrived at a village, about
fifty miles off, on his way home, wounded, and in great danger. I
instantly broke up the convivial party, and set out to see him. To the
imagination of a boy, as I was then, nothing could be more startling
than the aspect of the habitation which now held the haughty Earl of
Mortimer. After passing through a variety of dungeon-like rooms, for the
house had once been a workhouse, or something of the kind, I was ushered
into the chamber where the patient lay. The village doctor, and one or
two of the wise people of the neighbourhood, who thought it their duty
to visit a stranger, that stranger being a man of rank, were standing
by; and the long faces of those persons, seconded by the professional
shake of the doctor's head, told me, that they at least had no hope. It
was not so with the sufferer himself, for he talked as largely and
loftily of what he was to do within the next t