not yet too late to think that all was not hopeless.  It appeared, too, that several letters had been written which had never reached me; so, while I accused them of neglect and forgetfulness, I was really more amenable to the charge myself; for, from the moment I had heard of my cousin Guy’s having been domesticated amongst them, and the rumours of his marriage had reached me, I suffered my absurd jealousy to blind my reason, and never wrote another line after.  I ought to have known how “bavarde” [boasting] Guy always was —­that he never met with the most commonplace attentions any where, that he did not immediately write home about settlements and pin-money, and portions for younger children, and all that sort of nonsense.  Now I saw it all plainly, and ten thousand times quicker than my hopes were extinguished before were they again kindled, and I could not refrain from regarding Lady Jane as a mirror of constancy, and myself the most fortunate man in Europe.  My old castle-building propensities came back upon me in an instant, and I pictured myself, with Lady Jane as my companion, wandering among the beautiful scenery of the Neckar, beneath the lofty ruins of Heidelberg, or skimming the placid surface of the Rhine, while, “mellowed by distance,” came the rich chorus of a student’s melody, filling the air with its flood of song.  How delightful, I thought, to be reading the lyrics of Uhland, or Buerger, with one so capable of appreciating them, with all the hallowed associations of the “Vaterland” about us!  Yes, said I aloud, repeating the well-known line of a German “Lied”—­

“Bakranzt mit Laub, den lieben vollen Becher.”

“Upon my conscience,” said Mr. Daly, who had for some time past been in silent admiration of my stage-struck appearance—­“upon my conscience, Mr. Lorrequer, I had no conception you knew Irish.”

The mighty talisman of the Counsellor’s voice brought me back in a moment to a consciousness of where I was then standing, and the still more fortunate fact that I was only a subaltern in his majesty’s __th—.

“Why, my dear Counsellor, that was German I was quoting, not Irish.”

“With all my heart,” said Mr. Daly, breaking the top off his third egg —­“with all my heart; I’d rather you’d talk it than me.  Much conversation in that tongue, I’m thinking, would be mighty apt to loosen one’s teeth.”

“Not at all, it is the most beautiful language in Europe, and the most musical too.  Why, even for your own peculiar taste in such matters, where can you find any language so rich in Bacchanalian songs as German?”

“I’d rather hear the “Cruiskeen Lawn” or the “Jug of Punch” as my old friend Pat.  Samson could sing them, than a score of your high Dutch jawbreakers.”

“Shame upon ye, Mr. Daly; and for pathos, for true feeling, where is there anything equal to Schiller’s ballads?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of his; but if you will talk of ballads,” said the Counsellor, “give me old Mosey M’Garry’s:  what’s finer than”—­and here began, with a most nasal twang and dolorous emphasis, to sing—­