“My dearest Joe, where hast thou hidden thyself this age?” cries the Captain, still holding both his friend’s hands; “I have been languishing for thee this fortnight.”

“A fortnight is not an age, Dick,” says the other, very good-humoredly.  (He had light blue eyes, extraordinary bright, and a face perfectly regular and handsome, like a tinted statue.) “And I have been hiding myself—­where do you think?”

“What! not across the water, my dear Joe?” says Steele, with a look of great alarm:  “thou knowest I have always—­”

“No,” says his friend, interrupting him with a smile:  “we are not come to such straits as that, Dick.  I have been hiding, sir, at a place where people never think of finding you—­at my own lodgings, whither I am going to smoke a pipe now and drink a glass of sack:  will your honor come?”

“Harry Esmond, come hither,” cries out Dick.  “Thou hast heard me talk over and over again of my dearest Joe, my guardian angel?”

“Indeed,” says Mr. Esmond, with a bow, “it is not from you only that I have learnt to admire Mr. Addison.  We loved good poetry at Cambridge as well as at Oxford; and I have some of yours by heart, though I have put on a red coat. . . .  ‘O qui canoro blandius Orpheo vocale ducis carmen;’ shall I go on, sir?” says Mr. Esmond, who, indeed, had read and loved the charming Latin poems of Mr. Addison, as every scholar of that time knew and admired them.

“This is Captain Esmond who was at Blenheim,” says Steele.

“Lieutenant Esmond,” says the other, with a low bow, “at Mr. Addison’s service.

“I have heard of you,” says Mr. Addison, with a smile; as, indeed, everybody about town had heard that unlucky story about Esmond’s dowager aunt and the Duchess.

“We were going to the ‘George’ to take a bottle before the play,” says Steele:  “wilt thou be one, Joe?”

Mr. Addison said his own lodgings were hard by, where he was still rich enough to give a good bottle of wine to his friends; and invited the two gentlemen to his apartment in the Haymarket, whither we accordingly went.

“I shall get credit with my landlady,” says he, with a smile, “when she sees two such fine gentlemen as you come up my stair.”  And he politely made his visitors welcome to his apartment, which was indeed but a shabby one, though no grandee of the land could receive his guests with a more perfect and courtly grace than this gentleman.  A frugal dinner, consisting of a slice of meat and a penny loaf, was awaiting the owner of the lodgings.  “My wine is better than my meat,” says Mr. Addison; “my Lord Halifax sent me the Burgundy.”  And he set a bottle and glasses before his friends, and ate his simple dinner in a very few minutes, after which the three fell to, and began to drink.  “You see,” says Mr. Addison, pointing to his writing-table, whereon was a map of the action at Hochstedt, and several other gazettes and pamphlets relating to the battle, “that I, too, am busy about your affairs, Captain.  I am engaged as a poetical gazetteer, to say truth, and am writing a poem on the campaign.”