‘Come, Belle,’ said I, ’I have bidden the gentleman welcome, I beseech you, therefore, to make him welcome; he is a stranger, where we are at home, therefore, even did we wish him away, we are bound to treat him kindly.’

‘That’s not English doctrine,’ said the man in black.

‘I thought the English prided themselves on their hospitality,’ said I.

‘They do so,’ said the man in black; ’they are proud of showing hospitality to people above them, that is, to those who do not want it, but of the hospitality which you were now describing, and which is Arabian, they know nothing.  No Englishman will tolerate another in his house, from whom he does not expect advantage of some kind, and to those from whom he does he can be civil enough.  An Englishman thinks that, because he is in his own house, he has a right to be boorish and brutal to any one who is disagreeable to him, as all those are who are really in want of assistance.  Should a hunted fugitive rush into an Englishman’s house, beseeching protection, and appealing to the master’s feelings of hospitality, the Englishman would knock him down in the passage.’

‘You are too general,’ said I, ’in your strictures.  Lord —–­, the unpopular Tory minister, was once chased through the streets of London by a mob, and, being in danger of his life, took shelter in the shop of a Whig linen-draper, declaring his own unpopular name, and appealing to the linen-draper’s feelings of hospitality; whereupon the linen-draper, utterly forgetful of all party rancour, nobly responded to the appeal, and telling his wife to conduct his lordship upstairs, jumped over the counter, with his ell in his hand, and placing himself with half-a-dozen of his assistants at the door of his boutique, manfully confronted the mob, telling them that he would allow himself to be torn to a thousand pieces ere he would permit them to injure a hair of his lordship’s head:  what do you think of that?’

‘He! he! he!’ tittered the man in black.

‘Well,’ said I, ’I am afraid your own practice is not very different from that which you have been just now describing; you sided with the Radical in the public-house against me, as long as you thought him the most powerful, and then turned against him when you saw he was cowed.  What have you to say to that?’

’Oh, when one is in Rome, I mean England, one must do as they do in England; I was merely conforming to the custom of the country, he! he! but I beg your pardon here, as I did in the public-house.  I made a mistake.’

‘Well,’ said I, ’we will drop the matter, but pray seat yourself on that stone, and I will sit down on the grass near you.’

The man in black, after proffering two or three excuses for occupying what he supposed to be my seat, sat down upon the stone, and I squatted down, gypsy-fashion, just opposite to him, Belle sitting on her stool at a slight distance on my right.  After a time I addressed him thus:  ’Am I to reckon this a mere visit of ceremony? should it prove so, it will be, I believe, the first visit of the kind ever paid me.’