postillion, that rustic is not I—that's my carriage. Miss Morland, for God's sake, stop! Rustic! bumpkin!” "Hark ye, Mr. Froth, I'm rustic and bumpkin no longer. This young lady has consented to be my wife, and my wife she shall be, thanks to your carriage and well-laid scheme. My name is Sir Henry Rawdon, and, by the light of heaven, if you move one step nearer, I'll blow out your brains with your own pistol-drive on !" The carriage swept along at the rate of sixteen miles an hour, and Mr. Froth could only say to Sir Timothy as he approached, "Done, by Jupiter! my carriage, my pistols, my money, my plan, my every thing-it will be a brilliant event before the finis. Can't we pursue them sir ?" "My horses are lame, Mr. Froth." "But mine are in the stable." FIRST LOVE. I SHALL never forget the first time I ever drank rum-punch after having been smoking cigars. ઃઃ Dates," says De Quincy, "may be forgotten epochs never." That formed an epoch in my existence; And the last trace of feeling with life shall depart, Ere the smack of that moment shall pass from my heart. Let me recal it to my memory, with all its attendant circumstances; and while my soul broods over the delicious recollection, forget the resent day, with its temporary miseries, and nt out from its view the follies, the frivolities, the wickedness, the baseness, the ingratitude of the world. It happened, that although, like most men who, in my day, were reared in Trinity College, juxta Dublin, I had been tolerably well initiated inte the theory and practice of compotation, I had never once taken to its greatest adjunct, smoking. I do not think that the Trinity men (Dublin) smoke it certainly, as long as I remember that seminary, of which I cannot think but with affection, never was a fashion there. Particular pipemen, and solitary cigarers, no doubt, always existed, but just as you now and then see a pigtail (I do not allude to tobacco) dangling behind an elderly gentleman, or hear a shoe creak under the foot of a decent man. Smoking, in short, was the exception-non-smoking the rule. But the men of my time drank hard, though, as youths always do, unscientifically. I therefore, as the rest, drank, and did not smoke. I was about twenty when I left the university, and went down to live with my father in a pretty seaport town. Here I mixed a good deal in boating-parties, and other such excursions, with sea-faring men, and from them, after much persuasion on their parts, I learned to smoke. My first preceptors preferred the pipe. I shall not here enter into the controversy which has so long agitated the world, concerning the superiority of pipe or cigar. I am tired of controversies; I am weary of hunting, and fain would lie down. For the same reason, I pass all mention of the too celebrated, though in reality, minor dispute, concerning the length of the pipe, which cost my friend, Captain O'Shaughnessy, his life. Though he died as became a man of honour and a gentleman, it may be permitted to a friend to avert his eyes from the melancholy cause which deprived VOL. II. |