“What is the old fellow twaddlin’ about?” cries Brummell.  “He is talking about some knight?—­I never spoke to a knight, and very seldom to a baronet.  Firkins, my butterman, was a knight—­a knight and alderman.  Wales knighted him once on going into the City.”

“I am not surprised that the gentleman should not understand Messire Eustace of St. Peter’s,” said the ghostly individual addressed as Mr. Sterne.  “Your reading doubtless has not been very extensive?”

“Dammy, sir, speak for yourself!” cries Mr. Brummell, testily.  “I never professed to be a reading man, but I was as good as my neighbors.  Wales wasn’t a reading man; York wasn’t a reading man; Clarence wasn’t a reading man; Sussex was, but he wasn’t a man in society.  I remember reading your ‘Sentimental Journey,’ old boy:  read it to the Duchess at Beauvoir, I recollect, and she cried over it.  Doosid clever amusing book, and does you great credit.  Birron wrote doosid clever books, too; so did Monk Lewis.  George Spencer was an elegant poet, and my dear Duchess of Devonshire, if she had not been a grande dame, would have beat ’em all, by George.  Wales couldn’t write:  he could sing, but he couldn’t spell.”

“Ah, you know the great world? so did I in my time, Mr. Brummell.  I have had the visiting tickets of half the nobility at my lodgings in Bond Street.  But they left me there no more cared for than last year’s calendar,” sighed Mr. Sterne.  “I wonder who is the mode in London now?  One of our late arrivals, my Lord Macaulay, has prodigious merit and learning, and, faith, his histories are more amusing than any novels, my own included.”

“Don’t know, I’m sure not in my line.  Pick this bone of chicken,” says Mr. Brummell, trifling with a skeleton bird before him.

“I remember in this city of Calais worse fare than you bird,” said old Mr. Eustace of Saint Peter’s.  “Marry, sirs, when my Lord King Edward laid siege to us, lucky was he who could get a slice of horse for his breakfast, and a rat was sold at the price of a hare.”

“Hare is coarse food, never tasted rat,” remarked the Beau.  “Table-d’hote poor fare enough for a man like me, who has been accustomed to the best of cookery.  But rat—­stifle me!  I couldn’t swallow that:  never could bear hardship at all.”

“We had to bear enough when my Lord of England pressed us.  ’Twas pitiful to see the faces of our women as the siege went on, and hear the little ones asking for dinner.”

“Always a bore, children.  At dessert, they are bad enough, but at dinner they’re the deuce and all,” remarked Mr. Brummell.

Messire Eustace of St. Peter’s did not seem to pay much attention to the Beau’s remarks, but continued his own train of thought as old men will do.