ore escape the shop than if he were languishing at a customer over a
"sweet article in white tarlatan"? In the two comfortable armchairs
side by side sit two indubitable specimens, male and female, of the
Anglo-Saxon family,--Mr. Morgan, that florid man, wiping his polished
bald head, and that fat lady fanning with all her might. Are they not
English? They are "out," and, judging from their recorded experiences,
only dying to be "in" again. "Such a set of cheating, lying, lazy set of
rascals are these Italians! Independence, air; don't talk to me of that
humbug! What they want is English travellers to fleece and English women
to marry." Near to these, at full length, on two chairs, one of which
reclines against a tree at an angle of about forty degrees, sits our
Yankee acquaintance, whom we may as well present by his name, Leonidas
Shaver Quackinboss; he is smoking a "Virginian" about the size of a
marshal's baton, and occasionally sipping at a "cobbler," which with
much pains he has compounded for his own drinking. Various others of
different ranks and countries are scattered about, and in the centre of
all, at a small table with a lamp, sits a short, burly figure, with a
strange mixture of superciliousness and drollery in his face, as
though there were a perpetual contest in his nature whether he would be
impertinent or amusing. This was Mr. Gorman O'Shea, Member of Parliament
for Inchabogue, and for three weeks a Lord of the Treasury when
O'Connell was king.

[Illustration: 044]

Mr. O'Shea is fond of public speaking. He has a taste for proposing, or
seconding, or returning thanks that verges on a passion, so that even
in a private dinner with a friend he has been known to arise and address
his own companion in a set speech, adorned with all the graces and
flowers of post-prandial eloquence. Upon the present occasion he has
been, to his great delight, deputed to read aloud to the company from
that magic volume by which the Continent is expounded to Englishmen,
and in whose pages they are instructed in everything, from passports
to pictures, and drilled in all the mysteries of money, posting, police
regulations, domes, dinners, and Divine service by a Clergyman of the
Established Church. In a word, he is reciting John Murray.

To understand the drift of the present meeting, we ought to mention
that, in the course of a conversation started that day at the _table
d'hote_ it was suggested that such of the company as fe