I was wending my cheerful way last evening toward my temporary lodgings in the bosom of that highly interesting family, the Higginses, who never did anything so low or ignoble as to work for their country, and are, consequently, enjoying the reward of their virtue, in the shape of a big pension from a grateful government. I was whistling contentedly the refrain of England’s “Marseillaise,” “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo when we do!”
On turning the corner of Rutland Square, my legs evinced a sudden and unexpected interest in the atmospheric and astronomic condition of the heavens, for I found myself progressing homeward at the rate of twenty miles an hour on the back of my head, with one foot pointing triumphantly to Saturn, and the other indicating the whereabouts of the Milky Way.
Having satisfied myself that my bodily inversion was not the result of an earthquake, I wound myself up at the Rotunda railings, ejected a few front teeth and some powerful ejaculations, and surveyed the position.
I had come to grief on a slide some eighteen inches wide and about forty feet in length. The mutinous, seditious, rebellious, and barbarous juvenile population of that ward must have been nearly a week improving that slide, until it was so slippery that a bucket of pitch couldn’t have stuck on it, and a coating of Dublin mud as adhesive as a dish of Boston baked beans, attached to my boot soles, afforded no protection to either person or property. The whole fiendish arrangement must have been organized with devilish ingenuity by either a Fenian engineer or a National League architect. Rage, anguish, revenge, agony, surged through my bosom as I contemplated the icy snare.
But it is strange how the misfortunes of others reconcile us to our own. In this instance, balm was poured upon the troubled waters of my soul and my head was metaphorically bandaged and plastered as I saw approaching the fatal spot, Ensign Wilson of the Lancers, and the fair Araminta Higgins.
They were mashing.
He, in all the pristine glory of a new tunic and a re-dyed sash, preserved the best traditions of the British uniform by the ardor of his suit. He was passionate, eloquent, effusive; she was bashful, simpering, and lackadaisical, as became a pensioned Higgins.
“Araminta,” he murmured softly, “believe no base calumnies. I am as true to thee as—as—as thy father to his pension or the needle to the pole. I am thine—thine only. No power on earth can sever us.”
At this moment he shot off suddenly, leaving his hat at the lady’s feet and slinging his umbrella out into the roadway. A few minutes afterward a dejected and dilapidated British officer was indulging in profane observations of a remarkably ornamental and original description as he supported himself against a friendly lamp-post, while the dormant Irish blood in the fickle Araminta asserted itself through the medium of a coarse laugh.
They vanished in the darkness, but I do not think the enamored ensign spooned any more that night. Barely had they disappeared, when two prominent members of the Constitutional Club crossed the street from the direction of the house of a certain eminent judge. They were energetically discussing the National League campaign in Ulster. They neared the precipice—I mean the slide.