“Word for word,” returned Lewis.
“Well, I thought better things of him! ‘Folks is sich fools!’ as my old lady downstairs says. Are you off? Mind you are at home in good time for dinner, for I have been seduced into accepting another evening engagement for us.”
“Any more fighting?” asked Lewis anxiously.
“No; thank goodness for that same!” returned Frere.
“I wish I could meet that long Chartist,” continued Lewis, shaking his fist; “not that I bear him any ill-will, but it would be such a relief to me just now to knock somebody down. Mayn’t I set Faust at a policeman?”
“Not unless you prefer Brixton to Broadhurst, and the treadmill to the tutorship,” returned Frere.
“Well, good-bye till dinner-time,” responded Lewis, leaving the room. “I won’t punish your carpet any longer. Come, Faust!”
“That is a most singular young man,” soliloquised Frere as he took down and unrolled a Persian manuscript; “very like an excitable steam-engine with an ill-regulated safety-valve in disposition; I only hope he won’t blow up bodily while I have the care of him. He is a fine fellow, too, and it’s impossible not to be very fond of him; but he’s an awful responsibility for a quiet man to have thrust upon him.”
Meanwhile Lewis, walking hurriedly up one street and down another, with the design of allaying the fever of his mind by bodily exercise, found himself at length in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park, and, tempted by the beauty of the afternoon, he continued his stroll till he reached Kensington Gardens. Here, stretching himself on one of the benches, he watched the groups of gaily-dressed loungers and listened to the military band, till he began to fear he might be late for Frere’s dinner; and retracing his steps, he proceeded along the bank of the Serpentine towards Hyde Park Corner. As he arrived nearly opposite the receiving-house of the Humane Society, his attention was attracted by the lamentations of a small child, whom all the endearments of a sympathising nursery-maid were powerless to console. The child, being a fine sturdy boy, and the maid remarkably pretty, Lewis was moved by a sudden impulse of compassion to stop and inquire the cause of the grief he beheld. It was soon explained. Master Tom had come to sail a little boat which his grandpapa had given him; the string by which the length of its voyage was to have been regulated had broken, and the boat had drifted farther and farther from its hapless owner, until at last it had reached a species of buoy, to which the park-keeper’s punt was occasionally moored, and there it had chosen to stick hard and fast. In this rebellious little craft was embarked, so to speak, all Master Tom’s present stock of earthly happiness; thence the sorrow which Mary’s caresses were unable to assuage, and thence the lamentations which had attracted Lewis’s attention.
“Don’t cry so, my little man, and we’ll see if we can’t find a way of getting it for you,” observed Lewis encouragingly, raising the distressed shipowner in his arms to afford him a better view of his stranded property. “We must ask my dog to go and fetch it for us. Come here, Mr. Faust. You are not afraid of him? he won’t hurt you—that’s right, pat him; there’s a brave boy; now ask him to fetch your boat for you. Say, ‘Please, Mr. Faust, go and get me my boat!’ say so.” And the child, half-pleased, half-frightened, but with implicit faith in the dog’s intellectual powers, and the advisability of conciliating its good will and imploring its assistance, repeated the desired formula with great unction.