me exposed him to my very inferior skill.  At the third pass I ran him through the sword arm.  He staggered back with the twinge; but at the instant when he was about to bound on me, and perhaps take his revenge, a scream stopped us all; a female, wrapped in cloak and veil, rushed forward, and threw herself into Lafontaine’s arms in a passion of sobs.  An attendant, who soon came up, explained the circumstance; and it finally turned out, that the fair Mariamne, whatever her coquetry might have intended at night, repented at morn; recollected some of the ominous expressions of her lover; and on hearing that he had been seen with a group entering the grove, and that I, too, was absent, had conjectured the truth at once, and flown, with her femme de chambre, to the rendezvous.  She had come just in time.

The reconciliation was complete.  I was now not only forgiven by the lover, but was the “very best friend he had in the world;—­a man of honour, a paragon, a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.”  The wound of the gallant chasseur was bound up, like an ancient knight’s, with his mistress’s scarf.  She upbraided me, with her glistening eyes, for having had the audacity to quarrel with her hero; and then, with the same eyes, thanked me for the opportunity of proving her faith to cher et malheureux Charles.  Her little heart poured out its full abundance in her voluble tongue; and for a quarter of an hour, and it is a long life for happiness, we were the happiest half dozen in Christendom.

How Mordecai would admire all this, was yet to be told; but my casual mention of his name broke up the rapture at once.  Mariamne suddenly became sensible of the irregularity of alternately fainting and smiling in the arms of a handsome young soldier; and in the presence, too, of so many spectators, all admirers of her black eyes and blooming sensibilities.  She certainly looked to me much prettier than in her full-dress charms of the evening before, and I almost began to think that the prize was worth contending for; but the guardsman and the old general had felt the effects of the morning air, and were unsentimentally hungry.  Mariamne and her attendant were escorted to the edge of the plantation by her restored knight; and I accepted the general’s invitation to breakfast, instead of drowning myself in the next pond.

The general was lodged in the first floor of a fisherman’s dwelling, which, in more polished parts of the land, would have been pronounced a hovel; but in Brighton, as it then was, bore the name of a house.  We entered it through an apartment filled with matters of the fisherman’s trade,—­nets, barrels, and grapnels; and in a corner a musket or two, which had evidently seen service, though probably not in his Majesty’s pay.  The walls were covered with engravings of British sea-fights and favourite admirals, from the days of Elizabeth; patriotic in the highest degree, and most intolerable specimens of the arts; the floor, too, had its covering, but it was of nearly a dozen children of all sizes, from the bluff companion of his father down to the crier in the cradle; yet all fine bold specimens of the brood of sea and fresh air, British bull-dogs, that were yet to pin down the game all round the world; or rather cubs of the British lion, whose roar was to be the future terror of the foreigner.