and a
face ruddy from a life in the open air. He looked generous and kindly,
but just at the moment he was damning a waiter in language that would
have set fire to a stone bridge. Opposite him was a clear-eyed
soldierly man of about forty, whom I had heard called "Colonel," and
at the Colonel's right was a proud, dark-skinned man who kept looking
in all directions to make sure that people regarded him, seated thus
with a lord.

They had drunk eight bottles of port, and in those days eight bottles
could just put three gentlemen in pleasant humour. As the ninth bottle
came on the table the Colonel cried--

"Come, Strepp, tell us that story of how your father lost his papers.
Gad, that's a good story."

"No, no," said the young lord. "It isn't a good story, and besides my
father never tells it at all. I misdoubt it's truth."

The Colonel pounded the table. "'Tis true. 'Tis too good a story to be
false. You know the story, Forister?" said he, turning to the
dark-skinned man. The latter shook his head.

"Well, when the Earl was a young man serving with the French he rather
recklessly carried with him some valuable papers relating to some
estates in the North, and once the noble Earl--or Lord Strepp as he
was then--found it necessary, after fording a stream, to hang his
breeches on a bush to dry, and then a certain blackguard of a wild
Irishman in the corps came along and stole--"

But I had arisen and called loudly but with dignity up the long table,
"That, sir, is a lie." The room came still with a bang, if I may be
allowed that expression. Every one gaped at me, and the Colonel's face
slowly went the colour of a tiled roof.

"My father never stole his lordship's breeches, for the good reason
that at the time his lordship had no breeches. 'Twas the other way. My
father--"

Here the two long rows of faces lining the room crackled for a moment,
and then every man burst into a thunderous laugh. But I had flung to
the winds my timidity of a new country, and I was not to be put down
by these clowns.

"'Tis a lie against an honourable man and my father," I shouted. "And
if my father hadn't provided his lordship with breeches, he would have
gone bare, and there's the truth. And," said I, staring at the
Colonel, "I give the lie again. We are never obliged to give it twice
in my country."

The Colonel had been grinning a little, no doubt thinking, along with
everybody else in the room, that I was drunk or crazy; but t