“Where to?” said the driver.

“To a tailor’s, you rascal!”

“Ten thousand pounds! ha, ha, ha!” he repeated hysterically, when in the cab; and every moment grasping my arm.  Presently he subsided, looked me straight in the face, and muttered with agonizing fervor, “What a jolly brick you are!”

The tailor, the hosier, the boot-maker, the hair-dresser, were in turn visited by this poor pagan of externals.  As by degrees under their hands he emerged from the beggar to the gentleman, his spirits rose; his eyes brightened; he walked erect, but always nervously grasping my arm—­fearing, apparently, to lose sight of me for a moment, lest his fortune, should vanish with me.  The impatient pride with which he gave his orders to the astonished tradesman for the finest and best of everything, and the amazed air of the fashionable hairdresser when he presented his matted locks and stubble chin, to be “cut and shaved,” may be acted—­it cannot be described.

By the time the external transformation was complete, and I sat down in a Cafe in the Haymarket opposite a haggard but handsome thoroughbred-looking man, whose air, with the exception of the wild eyes and deeply browned face, did not differ from the stereotyped men about town sitting around us, Mr. Molinos Fitz-Roy had already almost forgotten the past.  He bullied the waiter, and criticised the wine, as if he had done nothing else but dine and drink and scold there all the days of his life.

Once he wished to drink my health, and would have proclaimed his whole story to the coffee-room assembly, in a raving style.  When I left he almost wept in terror at the idea of losing sight of me.  But, allowing for these ebullitions—­the natural result of such a whirl of events—­he was wonderfully calm and self-possessed.

The next day, his first care was to distribute fifty pounds among his friends, the cadgers, at a “house of call” in Westminster, and formally to dissolve his connection with them; those present undertaking for the “fraternity,” that for the future he should never be noticed by them in public or private.

I cannot follow his career much further.  Adversity had taught him nothing.  He was soon again surrounded by the well-bred vampires who had forgotten him when penniless; but they amused him, and that was enough.  The ten thousand pounds were rapidly melting when he invited me to a grand dinner at Richmond, which included a dozen of the most agreeable, good-looking, well-dressed dandies of London, interspersed with a display of pretty butterfly bonnets.  We dined deliciously, and drank as men do of iced wines in the dog-days—­looking down from Richmond Hill.

One of the pink-bonnets crowned Fitz-Roy with a wreath of flowers; he looked—­less the intellect—­as handsome as Alcibiades.  Intensely excited and flushed, he rose with a champagne glass in his hand to propose my health.

The oratorical powers of his father had not descended on him.  Jerking out sentences by spasms, at length he said, “I was a beggar—­I am a gentleman—­thanks to this—­”