"Hoorah for you!" cried Pisgah, looking the wrong way.
The glasses rattled an instant, amid iterations of "Hear! hear!" and Mr. Hugenot, rising, as it appeared from a bandbox, carefully surveyed himself in a mirror opposite, and touched his nose with a small nosegay.
"I feel, my friends, rather as your host than your guest to-night—"
("It isn't yesternight"—from Freckle—"it's to-morroer night.")
"For I, gentlemen, stand upon my hereditary, if not my native heath; and you are, at most, Frenchmen by adoption. That ancestry whose deeds will live when the present poor representative of its name is departed drew from this martial land its blood and genius."
(Loud cries of "Gammon" from Freckle, and disapprobation from Simp.)
"From the past to the present, my friends, is a short transition. I found you in Paris a month ago, poor and dejected. You are here to-night, with that luxury which was your heritage. And how has it been restored?"
("'At's so!" earnestly, from Pisgah.)
"By hard, grovelling work? Never! No contact with vulgar clay has soiled these aristocratic hands. The cavalier cannot be a mudsill! You are not like the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin. You have not toiled, gentlemen, but you have spun!"
(Great awakening, doubt, and bewilderment.)