and return him to his true friends.  Cards, race-meetings, and billiards may be introduced ad lib., also passion, prejudice, a faithful dog, and an infant prattler.  Death-scenes form an effective relief.  I have several which only need a touch or two to be complete.  That is the way to please the publishers and capture the public.  Try it, and let me know what you think.—­R.T.”]

CHAPTER I.

  Ah me, how shall we know the true,
  How mark the old, how fix the new? 
  Or teach the babe in arms to say,
  “Base, bold, bad boys are cheap to-day”?

NARR. The White Witch.

[Illustration]

SONOGUN scarcely knew what to do.  He had been up all day, wandering about the lanes which surrounded the family mansion.  A fitful light blazed in his magnificent eyes, his brow contracted until it assumed that peculiarly battered expression which is at once characteristic of a bent penny and consistent with the most sublime beauty.  To be properly appreciated he must be adequately described.  Imagine then a young man of twenty, who was filled with the bitterest hatred of the world, which he had forsworn two years ago, on being expelled from school for gambling.  There was about him an air of haughty reserve and of indifference which was equally haughty.  This it was his habit to assume in order to meet any neighbours who happened to meet him, and the result naturally was that he was not so popular as some inferior beings who were less haughty.  In fact he had a very short way with his relations, for whose benefit he kept a shell into which he frequently retired.  He was dangerously handsome, in the Italian style, and often played five bars of music over and over again, with one finger, to please his mother.  Some women thought he was an Apollo, others described him as an Adonis, but everybody invariably ended or began by calling him an ancient Roman.  He was sarcastic, satiric, and very strong.  Indeed, on one occasion, he absolutely broke the feathers on a hand-screen, and on another he cracked three walnuts in succession without looking up.  But, oh, the sufferings that young heart had undergone.  Slapped by his nurse, reproved by his mother, expelled by his schoolmaster, and shunned by the society of the country-side, it was small wonder that the brave soul revolted against its fellow-men, and set its jaws in a proud resolve to lash the unfeeling world with the contempt of a spirit bruised beyond the power of such lotions as the worldly-wise recommended for the occasion.  He whistled to his dog Stray, and clenched his fists in impotent anger.  An expression of gentleness stole over his features.  The idea was suggestive.  He, too, the proud, the honourable, the upright would steal, and thus punish the world.  He looked into his make-up box.  It contained bitter defiance, angry scorn, and a card-sharper’s pack of cards.  He took them out; and thus SONOGUN, the expelled atheist, made up his mind.