‘And down go all the kings, downstairs,’ I said, surveying them consecutively.

‘Yes,’ she replied, in a tone that might lead one to think it their lamentable fate.  ’And did the people look at you as you drove along through the streets, Master Richmond?’

I said ‘Yes,’ in turn; and then we left off answering, but questioned one another, which is a quicker way of getting at facts; I know it is with boys and women.  Mrs. Waddy cared much less to hear of Dipwell and its inhabitants than of the sensation created everywhere by our equipage.  I noticed that when her voice was not melancholy her face was.  She showed me a beautiful little pink bed, having a crown over it, in a room opening to my father’s.  Twenty thousand magnificent dreams seemed to flash their golden doors when I knew that the bed was mine.  I thought it almost as nice as a place by my father’s side.

‘Don’t you like it, Mrs. Waddy?’ I said.

She smiled and sighed.  ’Like it?  Oh! yes, my dear, to be sure I do.  I only hope it won’t vanish.’  She simpered and looked sad.

I had too many distractions, or I should have asked her whether my amazing and delightful new home had ever shown symptoms of vanishing; it appeared to me, judging from my experience, that nothing moved violently except myself, and my principal concern was lest any one should carry me away at a moment’s notice.  In the evening I was introduced to a company of gentlemen, who were drinking wine after dinner with my father.  They clapped their hands and laughed immoderately on my telling them that I thought those kings of England who could not find room on the windows must have gone down to the cellars.

‘They are going,’ my father said.  He drank off a glassful of wine and sighed prodigiously.  ’They are going, gentlemen, going there, like good wine, like old Port, which they tell us is going also.  Favour me by drinking to the health of Richmond Roy the younger.’

They drank to me heartily, but my father had fallen mournful before I left the room.

Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed to be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my mornings.  My father told the man who instructed me in the art of self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession.  I wrestled ten minutes every day with this man’s son, and was regularly thrown.  On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and was much looked at.  ’It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,’ he said.  We used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and the House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay of British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William Pitt (our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.