features; thick, flexible eyebrows; a loose, voluble mouth; a ridiculous
figure on a dandified foot. He represented to you one who was rehearsing
a part he wished to act before the world, and was not aware that he took
the world into his confidence.

How he had come there his elastic tongue explained in tropes and puns
and lines of dramatic verse. His patrimony spent, he at once believed
himself an actor, and he was hissed off the stage of a provincial
theatre.

'Ruined, the last ignominy endured, I fled from the gay vistas of the
Bench--for they live who would thither lead me! and determined, the day
before the yesterday--what think'st thou? why to go boldly, and offer
myself as Adlatus to blessed old Cudford! Yes! a little Latin is all
that remains to me, and I resolved, like the man I am, to turn, hic,
hac, hoc, into bread and cheese, and beer: Impute nought foreign to me,
in the matter of pride.'

'Usher in our old school--poor old Jack!' exclaimed Evan.

'Lieutenant in the Cudford Academy!' the latter rejoined. 'I walked the
distance from London. I had my interview with the respected principal.
He gave me of mutton nearest the bone, which, they say, is sweetest; and
on sweet things you should not regale in excess. Endymion watched the
sheep that bred that mutton! He gave me the thin beer of our boyhood,
that I might the more soberly state my mission. That beer, my friend,
was brewed by one who wished to form a study for pantomimic masks. He
listened with the gravity which is all his own to the recital of my
career; he pleasantly compared me to Phaethon, congratulated the river
Thames at my not setting it on fire in my rapid descent, and extended to
me the three fingers of affectionate farewell. "You an usher, a rearer
of youth, Mr. Raikes? Oh, no! Oh, no!" That was all I could get out of
him. 'Gad! he might have seen that I didn't joke with the mutton-bone.
If I winced at the beer it was imperceptible. Now a man who can do that
is what I call a man in earnest.'

'You've just come from Cudford?' said Evan.

'Short is the tale, though long the way, friend Harrington. From Bodley
is ten miles to Beckley. I walked them. From Beckley is fifteen miles to
Fallowfield. Them I was traversing, when, lo! near sweet eventide a fair
horsewoman riding with her groom at her horse's heels. "Lady," says I,
addressing her, as much out of the style of the needy as possible, "will
you condescend to direct me to Fallowfield?"--"A