stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and
salad.

Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were
seductresses for inducing him to drink wine--and a sparkling wine.

'It is to warm him,' they pleaded; and she said: 'He must be warm from
his walk'; and they said: 'But he is wet'; and said she, without a show
of feeling: 'Warm water, then'; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp
of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane
consideration. Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in
him; she remarked encouragingly:

'I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.'

She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and
he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly
bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and
the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we
slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
entering us to support. Subscribing to a principle, our energies are
refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before
the act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts
which we have at times: thoughts of England heading the nations; when
the smell of an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the
threading of a London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral
organ. It may be, that by the renunciation of any description of
alcohol, a man will stand clearer-headed to serve his country. He may
expect to have a clearer memory, for certain: he will not be asking
himself, unable to decide, whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or
a Mr. Jarniman, as the person he declined to receive. Either of the
two is repulsed upon his application, owing to the guilty similarity of
sounds but what we are to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency
in failing to remember; which accuses our physical condition, therefore
our habits.--Thus the little man debated, scarcely requiring more than
to hear the right word, to be a convert and make him a garland of the
proselyte's fetters.

Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the
putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to
put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk
of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however
pleasing it might be to a palat