with his handsome person.  The Countess of Longblower, very distinguished (according to the gossip of the kitchen), and wife of the celebrated Earl of that name, took him at once into the velvet of her good graces.  Here, after a little ripening at the hands of Samuel, the polite footman in ordinary, he shone out the star of her small but wonderfully select firmament.  There were suspicious whisperings and some scandal concerning what afterwards took place between my lady and Bolt; but as scandal and diplomacy seemed inseparable to an European atmosphere, we as noiselessly as possible laid the charge at the door of a certain sin.’  Here he would fling down his crutch.  ’The Countess’s carriage was forever at the door, waiting the pleasure of Mr. Secretary Bolt; he had a plate reserved at her table; he was the Adonis of her drawing-room; there was a seat for him in her opera-box.  In the front of the latter, facing the stately front of her ladyship, one of her sweetest smiles forced over her hard face, sat the handsome Bolt, now playing with the tassel of her fan, then passing upon the Cavatina a sort of rosewater approval.  He had a fund of small talk always at hand, and as her mightiness was extremely fond of such wares, so also did Bolt become a very agreeable person.  The Countess, too, would smile so condescendingly, and keep up such a conversation with her eyes, now and then glancing at the Earl, who dozed at a respectful distance in the rear.  If unexpectedly he exhibited signs of consciousness, Bolt would immediately divert the subject by passing some facetious criticisms on the rotundity of the primadonna.  And then my lady would chime in, having enjoyed her laugh:  ’Your lordship never did enjoy anything.’  The Earl’s nap over, and the last act near its close (her highness never condescended to remain for the vulgar ballet, and generally retired at the close of the fourth act), our hero would tenderly arrange her satin, make himself so polite! and then she took his arm so condescendingly, and exchanged the sweetest glances!  How often I pitied the poor Earl, as in the mightiness of his gravity he would bring up the rear, bearing her ladyship’s perfumed cambric.  Several times a tingle of wrath came over me, and I could not resist the thought, that had I been in the place of the poor Earl when my lady hung so rolickingly on the arm of Secretary Bolt, and sailed with such an affected youthfulness through the grand hall, to the no small danger of all muslin dresses in the way, my crutch had served as a means to separate them.  The old man, with weeping eyes, would now finger his bandanna and resume his crutch.  And then Samuel, in the full blaze of his livery, would stand conspicuously at the grand entrance, and ere her highness’s head loomed out at the top of the great stairs, announced her coming in a voice that seemed to strike dismay into all unliveried bystanders.’