Esmond smiled at this sign of confusion, and replied in the same language—­“I should know my Father in any garment, black or white, shaven or bearded;” for the Austrian officer was habited quite in the military manner, and had as warlike a mustachio as any Pandour.

He laughed—­we were on the church steps by this time, passing through the crowd of beggars that usually is there holding up little trinkets for sale and whining for alms.  “You speak Latin,” says he, “in the English way, Harry Esmond; you have forsaken the old true Roman tongue you once knew.”  His tone was very frank, and friendly quite; the kind voice of fifteen years back; he gave Esmond his hand as he spoke.

“Others have changed their coats too, my Father,” says Esmond, glancing at his friend’s military decoration.

“Hush!  I am Mr. or Captain von Holtz, in the Bavarian Elector’s service, and on a mission to his Highness the Prince of Savoy.  You can keep a secret I know from old times.”

“Captain von Holtz,” says Esmond, “I am your very humble servant.”

“And you, too, have changed your coat,” continues the other in his laughing way; “I have heard of you at Cambridge and afterwards:  we have friends everywhere; and I am told that Mr. Esmond at Cambridge was as good a fencer as he was a bad theologian.” (So, thinks Esmond, my old maitre d’armes was a Jesuit, as they said.)

“Perhaps you are right,” says the other, reading his thoughts quite as he used to do in old days; “you were all but killed at Hochstedt of a wound in the left side.  You were before that at Vigo, aide-de-camp to the Duke of Ormonde.  You got your company the other day after Ramillies; your general and the Prince-Duke are not friends; he is of the Webbs of Lydiard Tregoze, in the county of York, a relation of my Lord St. John.  Your cousin, M. de Castlewood, served his first campaign this year in the Guard; yes, I do know a few things, as you see.”

Captain Esmond laughed in his turn.  “You have indeed a curious knowledge,” he says.  A foible of Mr. Holt’s, who did know more about books and men than, perhaps, almost any person Esmond had ever met, was omniscience; thus in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but not quite.  Esmond’s wound was in the right side, not the left; his first general was General Lumley; Mr. Webb came out of Wiltshire, not out of Yorkshire; and so forth.  Esmond did not think fit to correct his old master in these trifling blunders, but they served to give him a knowledge of the other’s character, and he smiled to think that this was his oracle of early days; only now no longer infallible or divine.

“Yes,” continues Father Holt, or Captain von Holtz, “for a man who has not been in England these eight years, I know what goes on in London very well.  The old Dean is dead, my Lady Castlewood’s father.  Do you know that your recusant bishops wanted to consecrate him Bishop of Southampton, and that Collier is Bishop of Thetford by the same imposition?  The Princess Anne has the gout and eats too much; when the King returns, Collier will be an archbishop.”