“You’re early, Charley,” said Mr. Blake, with an affected mixture of carelessness and warmth. “You have not had breakfast?”
“No, sir. I have come to claim a part of yours; and if I mistake not, you seem a little later than usual.”
“Not more than a few minutes. The girls will be down presently; they’re early risers, Charley; good habits are just as easy as bad ones; and, the Lord be praised! my girls were never brought up with any other.”
“I am well aware of it, sir; and indeed, if I may be permitted to take advantage of the apropos, it was on the subject of one of your daughters that I wished to speak to you this morning, and which brought me over at this uncivilized hour, hoping to find you alone.”
Mr. Blake’s look for a moment was one of triumphant satisfaction; it was but a glance, however, and repressed the very instant after, as he said, with a well got-up indifference,—
“Just step with me into the study, and we’re sure not to be interrupted.”
Now, although I have little time or space for such dallying, I cannot help dwelling for a moment upon the aspect of what Mr. Blake dignified with the name of his study. It was a small apartment with one window, the panes of which, independent of all aid from a curtain, tempered the daylight through the medium of cobwebs, dust, and the ill-trained branches of some wall-tree without.
Three oak chairs and a small table were the only articles of furniture, while around, on all sides, lay the disjecta membra of Mr. Blake’s hunting, fishing, shooting, and coursing equipments,—old top-boots, driving whips, odd spurs, a racing saddle, a blunderbuss, the helmet of the Galway Light Horse, a salmon net, a large map of the county with a marginal index to several mortgages marked with a cross, a stable lantern, the rudder of a boat, and several other articles representative of his daily associations; but not one book, save an odd volume of Watty Cox’s Magazine, whose pages seemed as much the receptacle of brown hackles for trout-fishing as the resource of literary leisure.
“Here we’ll be quite cosey, and to ourselves,” said Mr. Blake, as, placing a chair for me, he sat down himself, with the air of a man resolved to assist, by advice and counsel, the dilemma of some dear friend.
After a few preliminary observations, which, like a breathing canter before a race, serves to get your courage up, and settle you well in your seat, I opened my negotiation by some very broad and sweeping truisms about the misfortunes of a bachelor existence, the discomforts of his position, his want of home and happiness, the necessity for his one day thinking seriously about marriage; it being in a measure almost as inevitable a termination of the free-and-easy career of his single life as transportation for seven years is to that of a poacher. “You cannot go on, sir,” said I, “trespassing forever upon your neighbors’ preserves; you must be apprehended sooner or later; therefore, I think, the better way is to take out a license.”