lit many dozen pairs of high-heeled Hoby boots,
and read the newspaper and the army-list duly, retire from the service
when they have attained their eighth lustre, and saunter through the
world, trailing from London to Cheltenham, and from Boulogne to Paris,
and from Paris to Baden, their idleness, their ill-health, and their
ennui. "In the morning of youth," and when seen along with whole troops
of their companions, these flowers look gaudy and brilliant enough;
but there is no object more dismal than one of them alone, and in its
autumnal, or seedy state. My friend, Captain Popjoy, is one who has
arrived at this condition, and whom everybody knows by his title of
Father Pop. A kinder, simpler, more empty-headed fellow does not exist.
He is forty-seven years old, and appears a young, good-looking man
of sixty. At the time of the Army of Occupation he really was as
good-looking a man as any in the Dragoons. He now uses all sorts of
stratagems to cover the bald place on his head, by combing certain
thin grey sidelocks over it. He has, in revenge, a pair of enormous
moustaches, which he dyes of the richest blue-black. His nose is a good
deal larger and redder than it used to be; his eyelids have grown flat
and heavy; and a little pair of red, watery eyeballs float in the midst
of them: it seems as if the light which was once in those sickly green
pupils had extravasated into the white part of the eye. If Pop's legs
are not so firm and muscular as they used to be in those days when he
took such leaps into White's buckskins, in revenge his waist is much
larger. He wears a very good coat, however, and a waistband, which he
lets out after dinner. Before ladies he blushes, and is as silent as a
schoolboy. He calls them "modest women." His society is chiefly among
young lads belonging to his former profession. He knows the best wine
to be had at each tavern or cafe, and the waiters treat him with much
respectful familiarity. He knows the names of every one of them; and
shouts out, "Send Markwell here!" or, "Tell Cuttriss to give us a bottle
of the yellow seal!" or, "Dizzy voo, Monsure Borrel, noo donny shampang
frappy," etc. He always makes the salad or the punch, and dines
out three hundred days in the year: the other days you see him in a
two-franc eating-house at Paris, or prowling about Rupert Street, or St.
Martin's Court, where you get a capital cut of meat for eightpence. He
has decent lodgings and scrupulously clean linen