‘You married men!’ exclaimed the stouter disputant, laughing.
‘A marriage extempore,’ muttered a saturnine young American, with an enormous head of black hair. ‘When are you going to send that little girl back to her mother?’
‘Silence, Pothook!’ cried the other, ‘you know that you would have given all the old shoes in your locker to have got one smile from her, yourself—’
‘Yes, envious Pothook,’ cried another youth, whose accent betrayed the Cockney, ‘if Cardwell has a notion to settle down in the calm of domestic life, and—’
‘Settle! Ten thousand blunderbusses!’ laughed the stout man, ‘When did you ever know Cardwell to settle anything but his grog bills—them’s the settlements he is most accustomed to.’
‘But I mean,’ added the Cockney; ‘that he is not running around after every pretty face like—like some people, always excepting the present honorable company, as a matter of course.’
‘Oh! of course!’ said Pothook feelingly.
‘Yet,’ remarked a tall, pale young man, who seemed to have recovered from some dangerous illness—‘Yet, let me tell you that Cardwell is not so innocent after all, as he seems to be. I saw him, the other day, stand for half an hour, looking up at a certain house in Clay street with all the eyes in his head, and meaning no offence to the gentleman, I don’t by any manner of means dispute his taste.’
‘Oh! the young villain!’ cried the stout man, roaring with laughter.
In the midst of his jollity and noisy vociferations, a young fellow from ‘the States’ who had been silent until then, demurely asked—‘Do any of you know what is good for rats?’