elegantly dressed females, all with
cigars in their mouths, were conversing with them from the open
drawing-room windows above, while sundry good-looking damsels ogled them
from the attics above. Such was the tableau that presented itself to Mr.
Sponge as he cantered round the turn that brought him in front of the
Elizabethan mansion of Nonsuch House.

Sir Harry, who was still rather drunk, thinking that every person there
must be either one of his party, or a friend of one of his party, or a
neighbour, or some one that he had seen before, reeled up to our friend as
he stopped, and, shaking him heartily by the hand, asked him to come in and
have something to eat. This was a godsend to Mr. Sponge, who accepted the
proffered hand most readily, shaking it in a way that quite satisfied Sir
Harry he was right in some one or other of his conjectures. Bugles, and all
the reeling, swaggering bucks, looked respectfully at the well-appointed
man, and Bugles determined to have a pair of nut-brown tops as soon as ever
he got back to town.

Sir Harry was a tall, wan, pale young man, with a strong tendency to
delirium tremens; that, and consumption, appeared to be running a match for
his person. He was a harum-scarum fellow, all strings, and tapes, and ends,
and flue. He looked as if he slept in his clothes. His hat was fastened on
with a ribbon, or rather a ribbon passed round near the band, in order to
fasten it on, for it was seldom or ever applied to the purpose, and the
ends generally went flying out behind like a Chinaman's tail. Then his
flashy, many-coloured cravats, stared and straggled in all directions,
while his untied waistcoat-strings protruded between the laps of his old
short-waisted swallow-tailed scarlet, mixing in glorious confusion with
those of his breeches behind. The knee-strings were generally also loose;
the web straps of his boots were seldom in; and, what with one set of
strings and another, he had acquired the name of Sixteen-string'd Jack. Mr.
Sponge having dismounted, and given his hack to the now half-drunken
Leather, followed Sir Harry through a foil and four-in-hand whip-hung hall
to the deserted breakfast-room, where chairs stood in all directions, and
crumpled napkins strewed the floor. The litter of eggs, and remnants of
muffins, and diminished piles of toast, and broken bread and empty toast
racks, and cups and saucers, and half-emptied glasses, and wholly emptied
champagne bottles, were scattered