nd gave me so much a night to risk at
play."

I looked at him in astonishment. To say that I thought these relations
strange would have been a waste of words.

"To be sure," Charles continued, "I was bound to learn, and could
acquire no younger." He flicked the glossy red backs of his horses with
his whip. "You are thinking it an extraordinary education, I know," he
added rather sadly. "I hav a-told you this--God knows why! Yes, because
I like you damnably, and you would have heard worse elsewhere, both of
him and of me. I fear you have listened to the world's opinion of Lord
Holland."

Indeed, I had heard a deal of that nobleman's peculations of the public
funds. But in this he was no worse than the bulk of his colleagues. His
desertion of William Pitt I found hard to forgive.

"The best father in the world, Richard!" cried Charles. "If his former
friends could but look into his kind heart, and see him in his home,
they would not have turned their backs upon him. I do not mean such
scoundrels as Rigby. And now my father is in exile half the year in
Nice, and the other half at King's Gate. The King and Jack Bute used
him for a tool, and then cast him out. You wonder why I am of the King's
party?" said he, with something sinister in his smile; "I will tell you.
When I got my borough I cared not a fig for parties or principles. I
had only the one definite ambition, to revenge Lord Holland. Nay," he
exclaimed, stopping my protest, "I was not too young to know rottenness
as well as another. The times are rotten in England. You may have virtue
in America, amongst a people which is fresh from a struggle with the
earth and its savages. We have cursed little at home, in faith. The
King, with his barley water and rising at six, and shivering in chapel,
and his middle-class table, is rottener than the rest. The money he
saves in his damned beggarly court goes to buy men's souls. His word is
good with none. For my part I prefer a man who is drunk six days out of
the seven to one who takes his pleasure so. And I am not so great a fool
that I cannot distinguish justice from injustice. I know the wrongs of
the colonies, which you yourself have put as clear as I wish to hear,
despite Mr. Burke and his eloquence.

[My grandfather has made a note here, which in justice should be
added, that he was not deceived by Mr. Fox's partiality.--D. C. C.]

And perhaps, Richard," he concluded, with a last lingering look at the
old pil