The servant in question, a stout, compact fellow, with a rich Milesian face and a mellow brogue, looked at him with a steady but smiling eye.

“Have a neck, is it?” he exclaimed; “by my sowl, an’ it’s sometimes an inconvenience to have that same.  My own opinion is, sir, that the neck now is jist one of the tenderest joints in the body.”

Norton looked at him for a moment with an offended and haughty stare.

“If you are incapable of driving the landau, sir,” he replied, “call some one who can; and don’t be impertinent.”

“Incapable,” replied the other, with a cool but humorous kind of gravity; “troth, then it’s disgrace I’d bring on my taicher if I couldn’t sit a saddle an’ handle a whip with the best o’ them.  And wid regard to the neck, sir, many a man has escaped a worse fall than one from the box or the saddle.”

Norton drew himself up with a highly indignant scowl, and turning his frown once more upon this most impertinent menial, encountered a look of such comic familiarity, easy assurance, and droll indifference, as it would not be easy to match.  The beau started, stared, again pulled himself to a still greater height—­as if by the dignity of the attitude to set the other at fault—­frowned more awfully, then looked bluster, and once more surveyed the broad, knowing face and significant laughing eyes that were fixed upon him—­set, as they were, in the centre of a broad grin—­after which he pulled up his collar with an air—­taking two or three strides up and down with what he intended as aristocratic dignity—­

“Hem! ahem!  What do you mean, sir?”

To this, for a time, there was no reply; but there, instead, were the laughing fascinators at work, fixed not only upon him, but in him, piercing him through; the knowing grin still increasing and gathering force of expression by his own confusion.

“Curse me, sir, I don’t understand this insolence.  What do you mean?  Do you know who it is you treat in this manner?”

Again he stretched himself, pulled up his collar as before, displaying a rich diamond ring, then taking out a valuable gold watch, glanced at the time, and putting it in his fob, looked enormously big and haughty, exclaiming again, with a frown that was intended to be a stunner—­after again pacing up and down with the genuine tone and carriage of true nobility—­

“I say, sir, do you know the gentleman whom you are treating with such impertinence?  Perhaps you mistake me, on account of a supposed resemblance, for some former acquaintance of yours.  If, so, correct yourself; I have never seen you till this moment.”

There, however, was the grin, and there were the eyes as before, to which we must add a small bit of pantomime on the part of Morty O’Flaherty, for such was the servant’s name, which bit of pantomime consisted in his (Morty’s) laying his forefinger very knowingly alongside his nose, exclaiming, in a cautious and friendly voice however,