man, and that his business position would have been materially injured by his fighting a duel.  The Irishman might have made the most of this triumph, such as it was.  But he was not content with doing so, and lost none of the opportunities, which the social habits of such a place daily afforded him, for insulting and outraging his enemy.  And he was continually boasting to his friends that before the end of the season he would compel him to come out and be shot at.

And before the end of the season came, his persistent efforts were crowned with success.  Plowden finding his life altogether intolerable under the harrow of the bully’s insolence, at length one day challenged him.  Then arose the question of the locality where the duel was to take place.  The laws of the duchy were very strict against duelling, and the Duke himself was personally strongly opposed to it.  In the case of his own favourite chamberlain, too, his displeasure was likely to be extreme.  But in the neighbourhood of the Baths the frontier line which divides the Duchy of Modena from that of Lucca is a very irregular and intricate one.  A little below the “Ponte” at the Baths, the Lima falls into the Serchio, and the upper valley of the latter river is of a very romantic and beautiful character.  Now we all knew that hereabouts there were portions of Modenese territory interpenetrating that of the Duchy of Lucca, but none of us knew the exact line of the boundary.  And the favourite chamberlain, with true Irish impudence, undertook to obtain exact information from the Duke himself.

There was a ball that night, at which the whole of the society were present, and, strange as It may seem, I do not think there was a man there who did not know that the duel was to be fought on the morrow, except the Duke himself.  Many of the women even knew it perfectly well.  The chamberlain getting the Duke into conversation on the subject of the frontier, learned from him that a certain highly romantic gorge, opening out from the valley of the Serchio, and called Turrite Cava, which he pretended to take an interest in as a place fitted for a picnic, was within the Modenese frontier.

All was arranged, therefore, for the meeting with pistols on the following morning; and the combatants proceeded to the spot fixed on, some five or six miles, I think, from the Baths.  Plowden, who, as a sedate business man was less intimate with the generality of the young men at the Baths, was accompanied only by his second; his adversary was attended by a whole cohort of acquaintances—­really far more after the fashion of a party going to a picnic, or some other party of pleasure, than in the usual guise of men bent on such an errand.