promise you
exacted from "Q." and myself after lunch at the Mitre, on the day when
we took our bachelors' degrees together--that if in our paths through
life we happened upon any circumstance that seemed to throw fresh
light on the dark, complex workings of the human heart, or at least
likely to prove of interest to a student of his fellow men, we would
write it down and despatch it to you, under cover of The Negus. During
the months of my engagement to Violet these communications of mine
(you will allow) were frequent enough: since our marriage they have
grown shamefully fewer. Possibly I lose alertness while I put on
flesh: it is the natural hebetudus of happiness. "Q."--who is never
seen now upon London stones--no doubt sends you a plenty of what
passes for news in that parish which it is his humour to prefer to the
Imperial City. But, believe me, the very finest romance is still to be
had in London: and to prove this I am going to tell you a story that,
upon my soul, Prince, will make you sit up.

Until last night the Seely-Hardwickes were a force in this capital.
They were three,--Seely-Hardwicke himself, who owned a million or
more, and to my knowledge drank Hollands and smoked threepenny Returns
in his Louis Quinze library; Mrs. Seely-Hardwicke, as beautiful as
the moon and clever to sinfulness; and Billy, their child, aged
seven-and-a-half. To-day their whereabouts would be as difficult to
find as that of the boy in Mrs. Hemans's ballad. You jump to the guess
that they have lost their money. You are wrong.

It was amassed in the canned-fruit trade, which, I understand,
does not fluctuate severely, though doubtless in the last instance
dependent on the crops. Seely-Hardwicke and his wife were ready to
lose any amount of it at cards, which accounts for a measure of their
success. It had been found (with Mrs. Seely-Hardwicke) somewhere
on the Pacific Slope, by a destitute Yorkshireman who had tired of
driving rivets on the Clyde and betaken himself across the Atlantic,
for a change, in front of a furnace some thirty-odd feet below decks.
Of his adventures in the Great Republic nothing is known but this,
that he drove into the silence of its central plain at the tail of a
traction engine and emerged on its western shore, three years later,
with a wife, a child and a growing pile. With this pile there grew
a desire to spend it in his own country; and the family landed at
Liverpool on Billy's sixth birthday. I thin