would meet him sauntering sadly about the gardens of the Villa Nazionale, often looking at his watch, which he always regulated by the cannon of Sant’ Elmo:  or gazing with lack-lustre eye at a shop-window in the Toledo; or sitting with a little glass of Marsala before him in one of the fashionable cafes, sunk in despondency.  But when at length he appeared at the dinner-table, once more fresh from his toilet, then did a gleam of animation transform his countenance; for the victory was won; yet again was old time defeated.  Then he would discourse his best.  Two topics were his:  the weather, and “my brother the baronet’s place in Lincolnshire.”  The manner of his monologue on this second and more fruitful subject was really touching.  When so fortunate as to have a new listener, he began by telling him or her that he was his father’s fourth son, and consequently third brother to Sir Grant Musselwhite—­“who goes in so much for model-farming, you know.”  At the hereditary “place in Lincolnshire” he had spent the bloom of his life, which he now looked back upon with tender regrets.  He did not mention the fact that, at the age of five-and-twenty, he had been beguiled from that Arcadia by wily persons who took advantage of his innocent youth, who initiated him into the metropolitan mysteries which sadden the soul and deplete the pocket, who finally abandoned him upon the shoal of a youngest brother’s allowance when his father passed away from the place in Lincolnshire, and young Sir Grant, reigning in the old baronet’s stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any provision at all.  Yet such were the outlines of Mr. Musselwhite’s history.  Had he been the commonplace spendthrift, one knows pretty well on what lines his subsequent life would have run; but poor Mr. Musselwhite was at heart a domestic creature.  Exiled from his home, he wandered in melancholy, year after year, round a circle of continental resorts, never seeking relief in dissipation, never discovering a rational pursuit, imagining to himself that he atoned for the disreputable past in keeping far from the track of his distinguished relatives.

Ah, that place in Lincolnshire!  To the listener’s mind it became one of the most imposing of English ancestral abodes.  The house was of indescribable magnitude and splendour.  It had a remarkable “turret,” whence, across many miles of plain, Lincoln Cathedral could be discovered by the naked eye; it had an interminable drive from the lodge to the stately portico; it had gardens of fabulous fertility; it had stables which would have served a cavalry regiment In what region were the kine of Sir Grant Musselwhite unknown to fame?  Who had not heard of his dairy-produce?  Three stories was Mr. Musselwhite in the habit or telling, scintillating fragments of his blissful youth; one was of a fox-cub and a terrier; another of a heifer that went mad; the third, and the most thrilling, of a dismissed coachman who turned burglar, and in the dead of night fired shots at old Sir Grant and his sons.  In relating these anecdotes, his eye grew moist and his throat swelled.