“Ay, that I do; and maintain it, too. I’d rather be the hero of that little adventure, and be able to recount it as you do,—for, mark me, that’s no small part of the effect,—than I’d be full colonel of the regiment. Well, I am sure I always thought it affecting. But, somehow, my dear friend, you don’t know your powers; you have that within you would make the fortune of half the periodicals going. Ask Monsoon or O’Malley there if I did not say so at breakfast, when you were grilling the old hen,—which, by-the-bye, let me remark, was not one of your chefs-d’oeuvre.”
“A tougher beastie I never put a tooth in.”
“But the story, the story,” said I.
“Yes,” said Power, with a tone of command, “the story, Sparks.”
“Well, if you really think it worth telling, as I have always felt it a very remarkable incident, here goes.”
CHAPTER XXXII
MR. SPARKS’S STORY.
“I sat at breakfast one beautiful morning at the Goat Inn at Barmouth, looking out of a window upon the lovely vale of Barmouth, with its tall trees and brown trout-stream struggling through the woods, then turning to take a view of the calm sea, that, speckled over with white-sailed fishing-boats, stretched away in the distance. The eggs were fresh; the trout newly caught; the cream delicious. Before me lay the ‘Plwdwddlwn Advertiser,’ which, among the fashionable arrivals at the seaside, set forth Mr. Sparks, nephew of Sir Toby Sparks, of Manchester,—a paragraph, by the way, I always inserted. The English are naturally an aristocratic people, and set a due value upon a title.”
“A very just observation,” remarked Power, seriously, while Sparks continued.