“Confound it!” cried Beecher, angrily, “don't you perceive there lies the whole annoyance? The fellow is known from one end of England to the other. You can't enter a club of a rainy day, when men sit round the fire, without hearing a story of him; you don't get to the third station on a railroad till some one says, 'Have you heard old Grog's last?' There's no end to him?”
“Wonderful resources!—astonishing!—great fun!”
“I'll be hanged if it is great fun, though you are pleased to say so,” said Beecher, angrily.
Twining was far too good-tempered to feel hurt by this peevishness, and only rubbed his hands and laughed joyfully.
“And the worst of all,” resumed Beecher,—“the worst of all is, he will be a foreground figure; do what you may, he will be in the front of the Stand-house.”
“Get him a situation abroad, my Lord,—something in the colonies,” broke in Twining.
“Not a bad thought that, Twining; only he is so notorious.”
“Doesn't signify in the least, my Lord. Every office under the Crown has its penal settlements. The Foreign Office makes its culprits consuls; the Colonial sends their chief justices to the Gold Coast; and the Home Secretary's Botany Bay is Ireland.”
“But would they really give me something,—I mean something he 'd take?”
“I have n't a doubt of it, my Lord; I wanted to get rid of a poor relation t' other day, and they made him a Boundary Commissioner at Baffin's Bay. Baffin's Bay!—what fun!” And he laughed immoderately.