And observe my reward:  I have a son—­my only one.  I have been divided from him for years; I am establishing his fortune; I know he is provided with comforts:  Richie, you remember the woman Waddy?  A faithful soul!  She obtained my consent at last—­previously I had objections; in fact, your address was withheld from the woman—­to call at your school.  She saw Rippenger, a girl of considerable attractions.  She heard you were located at Riversley:  I say, I know the boy is comfortably provided for; but we have been separated since he was a little creature with curls on his forehead, scarce breeched.’

I protested: 

‘Papa, I have been in jacket and trousers I don’t know how long.’

‘Let me pursue,’ said my father.  ’And to show you, Richie, it is a golden age ever when you and I are together, and ever shall be till we lose our manly spirit, and we cling to that,—­till we lose our princely spirit, which we never will abandon—­perish rather!—­I drink to you, and challenge you; and, mind you, old Hock wine has charms.  If Burgundy is the emperor of wines, Hock is the empress.  For youngsters, perhaps, I should except the Hock that gets what they would fancy a trifle pique, turned with age, so as to lose in their opinion its empress flavour.’

Temple said modestly:  ‘I should call that the margravine of wines.’

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.