“Mrs. Gill is very ill,
Nothing can improve her,
But to see the Tuillerie,
And waddle through the Louvre.”

None of these, I believe, however good and valid reasons in themselves, were the moving powers upon the present occasion; the all-sufficient one being that Mrs. Bingham had a daughter.  Now Miss Bingham was Dublin too —­but Dublin of a later edition—­and a finer, more hot-pressed copy than her mamma.  She had been educated at Mrs. Somebody’s seminary in Mountjoy-square—­had been taught to dance by Montague—­and had learned French from a Swiss governess—­with a number of similar advantages —­a very pretty figure—­dark eyes—­long eye-lashes and a dimple—­and last, but of course least, the deserved reputation of a large fortune.  She had made a most successful debut in the Dublin world, where she was much admired and flattered, and which soon suggested to her quick mind, as it has often done in similar cases to a young provincial debutante, not to waste her “fraicheur” upon the minor theatres, but at once to appear upon the “great boards;” so far evidencing a higher flight of imagination and enterprise than is usually found among the clique of her early associates, who may be characterized as that school of young ladies, who like the “Corsair” and Dunleary, and say, “ah don’t!”

She possessed much more common sense than her mamma, and promised under proper advantages to become speedily quite sufficiently acquainted with the world and its habitudes.  In the meanwhile, I perceived that she ran a very considerable risque of being carried off by some mustachoed Pole, with a name like a sneeze, who might pretend to enjoy the entree into the fashionable circles of the continent.

Very little study of my two fair friends enabled me to see thus much; and very little “usage” sufficed to render me speedily intimate with both; the easy bonhommie of the mamma, who had a very methodistical appreciation of what the “connexion” call “creature comforts,” amused me much, and opened one ready path to her good graces by the opportunity afforded of getting up a luncheon of veal cutlets and London porter, of which I partook, not a little to the evident loss of the fair daughter’s esteem.

While, therefore, I made the tour of the steward’s cell in search of Harvey’s sauce, I brushed up my memory of the Corsair and Childe Harold, and alternately discussed Stilton and Southey, Lover and lobsters, Haynes Bayley and ham.

The day happened to be particularly calm and delightful, so that we never left the deck; and the six hours which brought us from land to land, quickly passed over in this manner; and ere we reached “the Head,” I had become the warm friend and legal adviser of the mother; and with the daughter I was installed as chief confidant of all her griefs and sorrows, both of which appointments cost me a solemn promise to take care of them till their arrival in Paris, where they had many friends and acquaintances