The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best.  They let pass incredible stories:  among others, that she had sent cards to the nobility and gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver sacks of potatoes by newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their residences, at so much per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript, Vive L’aristocratie!  Their informant had seen a card, and the stamp of the Fleetwood dragoncrest was on it.

He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted nobleman.  But it was nothing worse than the parasite that he had.  This was the parasite’s gentle treason.  He found it an easy road to humour; it pricked the slug fancy in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle his patron kindly.  Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were personages during the town’s excitement, besought for having something to say.  Petrels of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub they created, and felt the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the laugh wherever they alighted.  Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in an eminent degree, enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his fellows.  They crowded round the bore who had scattered them.

He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl’s fortunes to the cunning of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like a gentleman:  a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young nobleman he was plotting to ruin.  Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane’s latest effort to hit the dirty object’s name, by calling him ’Fleetwood’s Mr. Woodlouse.’  And was the rascal a sorcerer?  Sir Meeson spoke of him in the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his disgust, corrected him sharply, and said:  ’I begin to be of Russett’s opinion, that his fault is his honesty.’  The rascal had won or partly won the empress of her sex!  This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of the tramp’s borrowed plumes!  Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory word on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.

Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable.  Thither one fair June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her beautiful cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to conduct them,—­merely a parade of observation once round;—­the ladies veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my lord’s pugilist, Christopher Ives.

Now, here we come to history:  though you will remember what History is.