’No, but seriously, by sometimes changing an old person to a young, sometimes a comical to a melancholy, or the reverse, sometimes a male for a female, or a female for a male—­I assure you, you can so entirely disguise the piece, and yet produce situations so new and surprising——.’

’I see, by all the gods at once, ’tis an immortal idea!  Let’s take Othello—­I’ll set about it to-morrow—­to-night, by Jove!  A gay young Venetian nobleman, of singular beauty, charmed by her tales of “anthropophagites and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders,” is seduced from his father’s house, and married by a middle-aged, somewhat hard-featured black woman, Juno, or Dido, who takes him away—­not to Cyprus—­we must be original, but we’ll suppose to the island of Stromboli—­and you can have an eruption firing away during the last act.  There Dido grows jealous of our hero, though he’s as innocent as Joseph; and while his valet is putting him to bed he’ll talk to him and prattle some plaintive little tale how his father had a man called Barbarus.  And then, all being prepared, and his bed-room candle put out, Dido enters, looking unusually grim, and smothers him with a pillow in spite of his cries and affecting entreaties, and——­ By Jupiter! here’s a letter from Bath, too.’

He had lighted the candles, and the letter with its great red eye of a seal, lying upon the table, transfixed his wandering glance, and smote somehow to his heart with an indefinite suspense and misgiving.

‘With your permission, my dear Puddock?’ said Devereux, before breaking the seal; for in those days they grew ceremonious the moment a point of etiquette turned up.  Puddock gave him leave, and he read the letter.

‘From my aunt,’ he said, throwing it down with a discontented air; and then he read it once more, thought for a while, and put it into his pocket.  ’The countess says I must go, Puddock.  She has got my leave from the general; and hang it—­there’s no help for it—­I can’t vex her, you know.  Indeed, Puddock, I would not vex her.  Poor old aunt—­she has been mighty kind to me—­no one knows how kind.  So I leave to-morrow.’

‘Not to stay away!’ exclaimed Puddock, much concerned.

’I don’t know, dear Puddock.  I know no more than the man in the moon what her plans are.  Lewis, you know, is ordered by the doctors to Malaga; and Loftus—­honest dog—­I managed that trifle for him—­goes with him; and the poor old lady, I suppose, is in the vapours, and wants me—­and that’s all.  And Puddock, we must drink a bowl of punch together—­you and I—­or something—­anything—­what you please.’