istinction of classes. They ought not
to be allowed to go everywhere. And who is yonder, that lady with the
two boys and the--the very high complexion?" Lady Kicklebury asks.

"That is a Russian princess: and one of those little boys, the one who
is sucking a piece of barley-sugar, plays, and wins five hundred louis
in a night."

"Kicklebury, you do not play? Promise your mother you do not! Swear
to me at this moment you do not! Where are the horrid gambling-rooms?
There, at that door where the crowd is? Of course, I shall never enter
them!"

"Of course not, ma'am," says the affectionate son on duty. "And if you
come to the balls here, please don't let Fanny dance with anybody, until
you ask me first: you understand. Fanny, you will take care."

"Yes, Tom," says Fanny.

"What, Hicks, how are you, old fellow? How is Platts? Who would have
thought of you being here? When did you come?"

"I had the pleasure of travelling with Lady Kicklebury and her daughters
in the London boat to Antwerp," says Captain Hicks, making the ladies
a bow. Kicklebury introduces Hicks to his mother as his most particular
friend--and he whispers Fanny that "he's as good a fellow as ever lived,
Hicks is." Fanny says, "He seems very kind and good-natured: and--and
Captain Hicks waltzes very well," says Miss Fanny with a blush, "and I
hope I may have him for one of my partners."

What a Babel of tongues it is in this splendid hall with gleaming marble
pillars: a ceaseless rushing whisper as if the band were playing its
music by a waterfall! The British lawyers are all got together, and
my friend Lankin, on his arrival, has been carried off by his brother
serjeants, and becomes once more a lawyer. "Well, brother Lankin," says
old Sir Thomas Minos, with his venerable kind face, "you have got your
rule, I see." And they fall into talk about their law matters, as
they always do, wherever they are--at a club, in a ball-room, at a
dinner-table, at the top of Chimborazo. Some of the young barristers
appear as bucks with uncommon splendor, and dance and hang about the
ladies. But they have not the easy languid deuce-may-care air of the
young bucks of the Hicks and Kicklebury school--they can't put on
their clothes with that happy negligence; their neck-cloths sit quite
differently on them, somehow: they become very hot when they dance, and
yet do not spin round near so quickly as those London youths, who have
acquired experience in corpore vili, and