“Oh, sir!” says Mrs. Heale, bursting into tears.  “And after the dreadful toothache which I have had this fortnight, which nothing but a little laudanum would ease it; and at my time of life, to mock a poor elderly lady’s infirmities, which I did not look for this cruelty and outrage!”

“Dry your tears, my dear madam,” says Tom, in his most winning tone.  “You will always find me the thorough gentleman, I am sure.  If I had not been one, it would have been easy enough for me, with my powerful London connections,—­though I won’t boast,—­to set up in opposition to your good husband, instead of saving him labour in his good old age.  Only, my dear madam, how shall I get the laudanum-bottle refilled without the doctor’s—­you understand?”

The wretched old woman hurried upstairs, and brought him down a half-sovereign out of her private hoard, trembling like an aspen leaf, and departed.

“So—­scotched, but not killed.  You’ll gossip and lie too.  Never trust a laudanum-drinker.  You’ll see me, by the eye of imagination, committing all the seven deadly sins; and by the tongue of inspiration go forth and proclaim the same at the town-head.  I can’t kill you, and I can’t cure you, so I must endure you.  What said old Goethe, in all the German I ever cared to recollect:—­

  “’Der Wallfisch hat doch seine Laus;
  Muss auch die meine haben.’

“Now, then, for Mrs. Penberthy’s draughts.  I wonder how that pretty schoolmistress goes on.  If she were but honest, now, and had fifty thousand pounds—­why then, she wouldn’t marry me; and so why now, I wouldn’t marry she,—­as my native Berkshire grammar would render it.”

CHAPTER VII.

LA CORDIFIAMMA.

This chapter shall begin, good reader, with one of those startling bursts of “illustration,” with which our most popular preachers are wont now to astonish and edify their hearers, and after starting with them at the opening of the sermon from the north-pole, the Crystal Palace, or the nearest cabbage-garden, float them safe, upon the gushing stream of oratory, to the safe and well-known shores of doctrinal commonplace, lost in admiration at the skill of the good man who can thus make all roads lead, if not to heaven, at least to strong language about its opposite.  True, the logical sequence of their periods may be, like that of the coming one, somewhat questionable, reminding one at moments of Fluellen’s comparison between Macedon and Monmouth, Henry the Fifth and Alexander:  but, in the logic of the pulpit, all’s well that ends well, and the end must needs sanctify the means.  There is, of course, some connection or other between all things in heaven and earth, or how would the universe hold together?  And if one has not time to find out the true connection, what is left but to invent the best one can for oneself?  Thus argues, probably, the popular preacher, and fills his pews, proving thereby clearly the excellence of