“None of your nonsense, Oliver, but for once give over the lore of talking of yourself, and let us have the story within three pages, if you expect to be out before Christmas with the Magazine! There are a host of better looking fellows than yourself have had their eyes upon the girls, and—to tell you the honest truth,—the game is above your reach.”
“By my faith in woman! Jeremy, you are as sharp this morning as a nor’-wester—I expect you have had your comb cut with one of them. Talking of cutting combs, reminds me of a story. When I was in the army!—”
“Ha! ha! ha! When you were in the army! By George! I like that part of the story amazingly—if the rest is only as good I may feel inclined to allow you half a page more!”
“Come, Jerry, none of that; I’ve known fellows talk about the army who never even heard a gun, and chaps spin out most eternal sea-yarns, that never smelt salt water, as any old tar would tell you before he had listened five minutes to the story; but I am none of your green-horns—I know what I am about when I mention war or beauty,—having seen some service in my day. I therefore commence properly—as every story should have a beginning, even if it has no end.”
“When I was in the army, you see, I became acquainted with a very sentimental fellow, about your size,—though he had rather a better looking whisker for a soldier,—who was always full of romance, and all that sort of thing,—and I do believe the chap had an idea or two of the right kind in his head, but they were so mixed up with the wrong kind, that, like the funds of a good many bankers now-a-days, they were not always ‘available.’ He had got it into his cranium, and there it would stick, that he had a little better blood in him than any body else, so that he was confoundedly careful not to have any of it spilt, and nothing but the daughter of a lord came any way near the mark to which he aspired. He used to tell a good many stories about himself, and he would tell them pretty well too, but they somehow or other had a smack of the marvellous. His stories about the doings among the gentry—the fellow, you see, had been educated by a lord, or something of that sort, and had seen a little of high life above stairs as well as below—took amazingly in the camp, especially his sentimental ones, for he had the knack of making a fool of himself—”
“But, for goodness sake, Oliver! the story!—the story!”
“The fact is, Jerry, I am pretty much in the predicament of the knife-grinder!—Story of my own—I have none to tell. But here is one of——confound the fellow’s name,—no matter.”
“Emily Melville—the only daughter of the proud Lord Melville, who was well known in the time of the wars—as the representative of the long line of illustrious Scottish nobles of that name, was the pride of the Lowland nobility, and the belle of every assembly. She was as fair as a white fawn, and scarcely less wild. Her mother being dead, few restraints were placed upon the young beauty by the old house-keeper, who, in the main, filled the place. Emily, therefore, held in proud disdain the restraints which would have been imposed by the prudes of her sex, and thought that the great art of living was to be happy. Laughter was always on her lips, and sunlight forever on her brow. She was beautiful, and you knew it, yet you could not tell the secret of it, nor, for their restlessness and brilliancy, whether her eyes were blue or gray, yet you knew that they were pretty, and felt that they were bright. Her voice was like the warble of a bird in spring, its notes were so full of joyousness; and her motion was like that of a fairy, so light and graceful, that, had you seen her tripping over the smoothly shaved lawn in front of the mansion—her auburn hair drooping in long ringlets over her snowy and finely rounded shoulders—and heard her gay glad voice, swelling out in song and happiness, you would have fancied her an angel from the upper sphere.”
“I doubt that last part, my good fellow”—interrupted a bluff old soldier—“until I had tried an arm around her, to see if she wasn’t flesh and blood, I wouldn’t a’ trusted fancy.”