day into the Shires, and he owed fifty
hundred without having the slightest grounds for supposing he should
ever be able to pay it, and he cared no more about either of these
things than he cared about the Zu-Zu's throwing the half-guinea
peaches into the river after a Richmond dinner, in the effort to hit
dragon-flies with them; but to be half a day without a cigarette, and to
have a disagreeable odor of apples and corduroys wafted up to him, was a
calamity that made him insupportably depressed and unhappy.

Well, why not? It is the trifles of life that are its bores, after all.
Most men can meet ruin calmly, for instance, or laugh when they lie in a
ditch with their own knee-joint and their hunter's spine broken over the
double post and rails: it is the mud that has choked up your horn just
when you wanted to rally the pack; it's the whip who carries you off
to a division just when you've sat down to your turbot; it's the ten
seconds by which you miss the train; it's the dust that gets in your
eyes as you go down to Epsom; it's the pretty little rose note that went
by accident to your house instead of your club, and raised a storm from
madame; it's the dog that always will run wild into the birds; it's the
cook who always will season the white soup wrong--it is these that are
the bores of life, and that try the temper of your philosophy.

An acquaintance of mine told me the other day of having lost heavy sums
through a swindler, with as placid an indifference as if he had lost a
toothpick; but he swore like a trooper because a thief had stolen the
steel-mounted hoof of a dead pet hunter.

"Insufferable!" murmured Cecil, hiding another yawn behind his gauntlet;
"the Line's nothing half so bad as this; one day in a London mob beats
a year's campaigning; what's charging a pah to charging an oyster-stall,
or a parapet of fascines to a bristling row of umbrellas?"

Which question as to the relative hardships of the two Arms was a
question of military interest never answered, as Cecil scattered the
umbrellas right and left, and dashed from the Houses of Parliament
full trot with the rest of the escort on the return to the Palace; the
afternoon sun breaking out with a brightened gleam from the clouds,
and flashing off the drawn swords, the streaming plumes, the glittering
breastplates, the gold embroideries, and the fretting chargers.

But a mere sun-gleam just when the thing was over, and the escort was
pacing back to