hat now was as
pretty a compliment as ever was paid in Kentucky, but she did not seen
to hear it.

"On the third day we were just passing St Helena, when old Lambton
came up to me. 'Mister Doughby,' said he, quite confidential like,
'pardon me, my dear good Mister Doughby, but don't you think that you
sometimes take rather too much ardent spirits, and thereby injure your
health as well as give a bad example to your fellow-citizens, which,
on the part of a respectable man like yourself, is very much to be
regretted?'

"'Bad example!' says I--'to be regretted, Mister Lambton!--I take too
much ardent spirits! I certainly am not of that opinion, Mister
Lambton, and if you are I can only say you are very much mistaken. You
shall see yourself,' said I, 'how much ballast an old Kentuckian can
take in without sinking under it: devil a diving duck ever swallowed
more water than a Kentucky man can rum.'

"I thought to let the old squaretoes see that he had a man before him,
not one of his spindleshanked tallow-chopped Yankees, who go sneaking
about the meeting-house from morning till night, or moping in their
rooms, and calculating and speculating how they can best take in
honest warm-blooded South and Westlanders. 'You shall see,' said
I--but he shook his head and walked away, and I looked after him, and
shook my head too. Pah! I found out afterwards that he was president
of a temperance society, the devil take them all! Temperance
societies! What is rum for, if it isn't to be drank?"

Doughby was rapidly warming with his subject.

"He is a queer old fellow, that Mister Lambton, as stiff and as cold
as an icicle on a water-butt. Of a morning he was scarcely out of bed
when he knocked at the door of the ladies' cabin in his brocade
dressing-gown, and Miss Lambton must come out and hear him read the
whole morning service of the Episcopal Church, and make the responses,
and so on, for a full hour. Then the whole day he walked about as
grave and solemn as the chief-justice of the district court. Before
dinner he said a grace which lasted a full quarter of an hour. The
soup was often cold, and half the dinner eaten up from under our
noses, while this was going on. Sometimes most of the other passengers
had done their dinner, and were gone to the bar to take a glass, and
he still praying. I was often ready to jump out of my skin with
impatience."

"The praying was all well enough, if it had not lasted so long," said
I, laughi