the past engagement, and the ladies are chilled, and your wife puts you the pungent question:  ‘Did you avoid politics, Con?’ in the awful solitude of domestic life after a party.  Now, if only there had been freedom of discourse during the dinner hour, the ten disembarrassed minutes allotted to close it would have afforded time sufficient for hearty finishing blows and a soothing word or so to dear old innocent Mr. Rumford, and perhaps a kindly clap of the shoulder to John Mattock, no bad fellow at bottom.  Rockney too was no bad fellow in his way.  He wanted no more than a beating and a thrashing.  He was a journalist, a hard-headed rascal, none of your good old-fashioned order of regimental scribes who take their cue from their colonel, and march this way and that, right about face, with as little impediment of principles to hamper their twists and turns as the straw he tosses aloft at midnight to spy the drift of the wind to-morrow.  Quite the contrary; Rockney was his own colonel; he pretended to think independently, and tried to be the statesman of a leading article, and showed his intention to stem the current of liberty, and was entirely deficient in sympathy with the oppressed, a fanatical advocate of force; he was an inveterate Saxon, good-hearted and in great need of a drubbing.  Certain lines Rockney had written of late about Irish affairs recurred to Captain Con, and the political fires leaped in him; he sparkled and said:  ’Let me beg you to pass the claret over to Mr. Rockney, Mr. Rumford; I warrant it for the circulating medium of amity, if he’ll try it.’

‘’Tis the Comet Margaux,’ said Dr. Forbery, topping anything Rockney might have had to say, and anything would have served.  The latter clasped the decanter, poured and drank in silence.

‘’Tis the doctor’s antidote, and best for being antedated,’ Captain Con rapped his friend’s knuckles.

‘As long as you’re contented with not dating in double numbers,’ retorted the doctor, absolutely scattering the precious minutes to the winds, for he hated a provocation.

‘There’s a golden mean, is there!’

’There is; there’s a way between magnums of good wine and gout, and it’s generally discovered too late.’

’At the physician’s door, then! where the golden mean is generally discovered to be his fee.  I’ve heard of poor souls packed off by him without an obolus to cross the ferry.  Stripped they were in all conscience.’

’You remind me of a fellow in Dublin who called on me for medical advice, and found he’d forgotten his purse.  He offered to execute a deed to bequeath me his body, naked and not ashamed.’

’You’d a right to cut him up at once, Forbery.  Any Jury ’d have pronounced him guilty of giving up the ghost before he called.’

‘I let him go, body and all.  I never saw him again.’

’The fellow was not a lunatic.  As for your golden mean, there’s a saying:  Prevention is better than cure:  and another that caps it:  Drink deep or taste not.’