arried when I came abroad for a short wedding-tour. The
world at that time required new-married people to lay in a small stock
of Continental notions, to assist their connubiality and enable them to
wear the yoke with the graceful ease of foreigners; and so Mrs O'D. and
I started with one heart, one passport, and--what's not so pleasant--one
hundred pounds, to comply with this ordinance. Of course, once over the
border--once in France--it was enough. So we took up our abode in a
very unpretending little hotel of Boulogne-sur-Mer called "La Cour de
Madrid," where we boarded for the moderate sum of eleven francs fifty
centimes per diem--the odd fifty being saved by my wife not taking the
post-prandial cup of coffee and rum.

There was not much to see at Boulogne, and we soon saw it. For a week or
so Mrs O'D. used to go out muffled like one of the Sultan's five hundred
wives, protesting that she'd surely be recognised; but she grew out of
the delusion at last, and discovered that our residence at the Cour de
Madrid as effectually screened us from all remark or all inquiry as if
we had taken up our abode in the Catacombs.

Now when one has got a large stock of any commodity on hand--I don't
care what it is--there's nothing so provoking as not to find a market.
Mrs O'D.'s investment was bashfulness. She was determined to be the
most timid, startled, modest, and blushing creature that ever wore
orange-flowers; and yet there was not a man, woman, or child in the
whole town that cared to know whether the act for which she left England
was a matrimony or a murder.

"Don't you hate this place, Cornelius?"--she never called me Con in the
honeymoon. "Isn't it the dullest, dreariest hole you have ever been in?"

"Not with you."

"Then don't yawn when you say so. I abhor it. It's dirty, it's vulgar,
it's dear."

"No, no. It ain't dear, my love; don't say, dear."

"Billiards perhaps, and filthy cigars, and that greenish
bitter--anisette, I think they call it--are cheap enough, perhaps; but
these are all luxuries I can't share in."

Here was the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that presaged the first
connubial hurricane. A married friend--one of much experience and
long-suffering--had warned me of this, saying, "Don't fancy you'll
escape, old fellow; but do the way the Ministry do about Turkey--put the
evil day off; diplomatise, promise, cajole, threaten a bit if needs be,
but postpone;" and, strong with these precepts, I ne