“By this time my blood was up, and I squared up to him, saying: 

“’What have we done?  We have whipped Johnny Bull just as I am going to thrash you under that very flag which you were pleased to designate a rag.’

“He saw I meant business, and bucked off, saying: 

“’Oh, but you carn’t.  I’m the son of Lady Jane McPherson, you know, and you carn’t touch me.’

“‘We’ll see if I carn’t,’ I answered, and then I pitched in and thrashed him till he cried for quarter, and I let him go, threatening all sorts of vengeance upon me, the worst of which was that he would tell his mother and have me arrested for assault and battery.

“That was my introduction to Neil McPherson, and I am ashamed of it now, for I came to like him very much.”

During the recital Miss McPherson had laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks, a thing very unusual to her, while neither Hannah nor Lucy could repress a smile at Grey’s earnestness, but Mr. Jerrold looked very grave, and his wife annoyed and displeased.

“I am glad to hear you acknowledge that you are ashamed,” Mr. Jerrold said; “for I was very much ashamed that a son of mine should so far forget himself as to fight a stranger whom he had never seen before.  But, in justice to you, I must add what you have omitted, which is that you went and apologized to the boy for the affront.”

“Did you?” Miss McPherson said, turning to Grey, who replied: 

“Yes; and I must say that he received my rather bungling apology better than I supposed he would.

“‘All right,’ he said, offering me his hand; ’I dare say I was a cad to say what I did of your flag, but you needn’t have hit me quite so hard.  Where did you learn boxing?’

“‘I never learned it,’ I told him.  ’It was natural to all the Yankees, who were born with clenched fists, ready to go at it.’

“He believed me, and said ‘Reely, is that so?’ and then he invited me to play billiards with him, and we got to be good friends, and he asked all sorts of questions about America, and said that our girls were the prettiest in the world when they were young.  All the English say that, and Neil had heard it forty times, so it was not original with him.  He said, however, that pretty as they were, his cousin, Bessie, was far prettier, that she was a most beautiful little creature, and as sweet as she was beautiful.”

“Bessie!” Miss McPherson exclaimed, with a peculiar ring in her voice, and a manner of greater interest than she had evinced in Grey’s recital of his encounter with Neil, “Do you mean the daughter of Archibald McPherson, my nephew, and did you see her?  Did you see Archie?”

Grey colored, and replied;

“No, I did not, for mother wished to punish me for fighting Neil, and so when a Mrs. Smithers asked us to spend a week with the McPhersons at her home in Middlesex, I was left behind in London with some friends, but I had great fun.  I went to the Tower, and the circus, and the Abbey, and the museum, and everywhere, though I was sorry not to see Bessie, who with her father and mother, was also at Captain Smithers’.”