My father beamed on him with great approving splendour.  ’Join us, Mr. Temple; you are a man of wit, and may possibly find this specimen worthy of you.  This wine has a history.  You are drinking wine with blood in it.  Well, I was saying, the darling of my heart has been torn from me; I am in a foreign land; foreign, that is, by birth, and on the whole foreign.  Yes!—­I am the cynosure of eyes; I am in a singular posture, a singular situation; I hear a cry in the tongue of my native land, and what I presume is my boy’s name:  I look, I behold him, I follow a parent’s impulse.  On my soul! none but a fish-father could have stood against it.

Well, for this my reward is—­and I should have stepped from a cathedral spire just the same, if I had been mounted on it—­that I, I,—­and the woman knows all my secret—­I have to submit to the foul tirade of a vixen.

She drew language, I protest, from the slums.  And I entreat you, Mr. Temple, with your “margravine of wines”—­which was very neatly said, to be sure—­note you this curious point for the confusion of Radicals in your after life; her Highness’s pleasure was to lend her tongue to the language—­or something like it—­of a besotted fish-wife; so! very well, and just as it is the case with that particular old Hock you youngsters would disapprove of, and we cunning oldsters know to contain more virtues in maturity than a nunnery of May-blooming virgins, just so the very faults of a royal lady-royal by birth and in temper a termagant—­impart a perfume! a flavour!  You must age; you must live in Courts, you must sound the human bosom, rightly to appreciate it.  She is a woman of the most malicious fine wit imaginable.

She is a generous woman, a magnanimous woman; wear her chains and she will not brain you with her club.  She is the light, the centre of every society where she appears, like what shall I say? like the moon in a bowl of old Rhenish.  And you will drain that bowl to the bottom to seize her, as it were—­catch a correct idea of her; ay, and your brains are drowned in the attempt.  Yes, Richie; I was aware of your residence at Riversley.  Were you reminded of your wandering dada on Valentine’s day?  Come, my boy, we have each of us a thousand things to relate.  I may be dull—­I do not understand what started you on your journey in search of me.  An impulse?  An accident?  Say, a directing angel!  We rest our legs here till evening, and then we sup.  You will be astonished to hear that you have dined.  ’Tis the fashion with the Germans.  I promise you good wine shall make it up to you for the return to school-habits.  We sup, and we pack our scanty baggage, and we start tonight.  Brook no insult at Courts if you are of material value:  if not, it is unreservedly a question whether you like kickings.’

My father paused, yawned and stretched, to be rid of the remainder of his aches and stiffness.  Out of a great yawn he said: