LETTER XXXII. KENNY JAMES DODD TO THOMAS PURCELL, ESQ., OF THE GRANGE,
BRUFF.
Florence.
Well, my dear Tom, my task is at last completed,—my magnum opus accomplished. I have carried all my measures, if not with triumphant majorities, at least with a "good working party," as the slang has it, and I stand proudly pre-eminent the head of the Dodd Administration. I have no patience for details. I like better to tell you the results in some striking paragraph, to be headed "Latest Intelligence," and to run thus: "Our last advices inform us that, notwithstanding the intrigues in the Cabinet, K. I. maintains his ascendency. We have no official intelligence of the fact, but all the authorities concur in believing that the Dodds are about to leave the Continent and return to Ireland."
Ay, Tom, that is the grand and comprehensive measure of family reform I have so long labored over, and at length have the proud gratification to see Law!
I find, on looking back, that I left off on my being sent for by Belton. I 'll try and take up one of the threads of my tangled narrative at that point. I found him at his hotel in conversation with a very smartly dressed, well-whiskered, kid-gloved little man, whom he presented as "Mr. Curl Davis, of Lincoln's Inn." Mr. D. was giving a rather pleasant account of the casualties of his first trip to Italy when I entered, but immediately stopped, and seemed to think that the hour of business should usurp the time of mere amusement.
Belton soon informed me why, by telling me that Mr. C. D. was a London collector who transacted the foreign affairs for various discounting houses at home, and who held a roving commission to worry, harass, and torment all such and sundry as might have drawn, signed, or endorsed bills, either for their own accommodation or that of their friends.
Now, I had not the most remote notion how I should come to figure in this category. I knew well that you had "taken care of"—that's the word—all my little missives in that fashion. So persuaded was I of my sincerity that I offered him at once a small wager that he had mistaken his man, and that it was, in fact, some other Dodd, bent on bringing our honorable name to shame and disgrace.
"It must, under these circumstances, then," said he, "be a very gross case of forgery, for the name is yours; nor can I discover any other with the same Christian names." So saying, he produced a pocket-book, like a family Bible, and drew from out a small partition of it a bill for five hundred pounds, at nine months, drawn and endorsed by me in favor of the Hon. Augustus Gore Hampton!