Soon after Mr. Cudmore’s enlistment under the banners of the Clanfrizzle, he had sought and found an asylum in the drawing-room of the establishment, which promised, from its geographical relations, to expose him less to the molestations of conversation than most other parts of the room.  This was a small recess beside the fire-place, not uncommon in old-fashioned houses, and which, from its incapacity to hold more than one, secured to the worthy recluse the privacy he longed for; and here, among superannuated hearth-brushes, an old hand screen, an asthmatic bellows, and a kettle-holder, sat the timid youth, “alone, but in a crowd.”  Not all the seductions of loo, limited to three pence, nor even that most appropriately designated game, beggar-my-neighbour—­could withdraw him from his blest retreat.  Like his countryman, St. Kevin—­my friend Petrie has ascertained that the saint was a native of Tralee—­he fled from the temptations of the world, and the blandishments of the fair; but, alas! like the saint himself, the

                        “poor jib little knew
                         All that wily sex can do;”

For while he hugged himself in the security of his fortress, the web of his destiny was weaving.  So true is it, as he himself used, no less pathetically than poetically to express it, “misfortune will find you out, if ye were hid in a tay chest.”

It happened that in Mrs. Clanfrizzle’s establishment, the “enfant bleu,” already mentioned, was the only individual of his sex retained; and without for a moment disparaging the ability or attentions of this gifted person, yet it may reasonably be credited, that in waiting on a party of twenty-five or thirty persons at dinner, all of whom he had admitted as porter, and announced as maitre d’hotel, with the subsequent detail of his duties in the drawing-room, that Peter, blue Peter—­his boarding-house soubriquet—­not enjoying the bird-like privilege of “being in two places at once,” gave one rather the impression of a person of hasty and fidgetty habits—­for which nervous tendency the treatment he underwent was certainly injudicious—­it being the invariable custom for each guest to put his services in requisition, perfectly irrespective of all other claims upon him, from whatsoever quarter coming—­and then, at the precise moment that the luckless valet was snuffing the candles, he was abused by one for not bringing coal; by another for having carried off his tea-cup, sent on an expedition for sugar; by a third for having left the door open, which he had never been near; and so on to the end of the chapter.