--d." The
consequence was, that the three entered the room nearly together. Great
was their surprise, however--at least of two of them their disgust,
their abhorrence, on seeing, as they approached his bed-room, a
female--Young certainly, and handsome--wrapped in a night-dress--her
naked feet slippered, her nice flushed and her gait tottering, escaping,
as it were, out of it.

On passing them, which it was necessary she should do, she did not
seem ashamed, but turned her eyes on them with an expression of maudlin
resentment, that distorted her handsome but besotted features into
something that was calculated to shock those who looked upon her. There
she passed, a licentious homily upon an ill-spent life--upon a life
of open, steady, and undeviating profligacy; there she passed the
meretricious angel of his death-bed, actually chased by the presence of
men from the delirious depravity of his dying pollutions!

"There is no necessity, gentlemen," said Val, "for my making an apology
for this shocking sight--you all know the life, in this respect, that my
unfortunate father led."

* This, like most other scenes in the present work, is no
fiction.

"In any case it is unprecedented," replied one of them; "but if he be so
near death, as we apprehend, it is utterly unaccountable--it is awful."
They then entered.

Deaker was lying a little raised, with an Orange silk night-cap on his
head, embellished with a figure of King William on horseback. Three or
four Orange pocket-handkerchiefs, each, owing to the excellent taste of
the designer, with a similar decoration of his Majesty in the centre,
lay about the bed, and upon a little table that stood near his head.
There was no apothecary's bottles visible, for it is well known that
whatever may have been the cause of Deaker's death he died not of
any malady known in the Pharmacopeia. In truth, he died simply of an
over-wrought effort at reviving his departed energies, joined to a most
loyal, but indomitable habit of drinking the Glorious Memory in brandy.

"Well, Vulture," said he on seeing Val, "do you smell the death-damp
yet, that you're here? Is the putrefaction of my filthy old carcase on
the wind yet? Here Lanty, you imp," he said turning his eyes on the ripe
youth as he brought in a large jug of the "Boyne"--in other words of
St. Patrick's Well water--"I say you--you clip, do you smell the
putrefaction of my filthy old carcase yet? eh?"

"Begad, sir, it's n