“But perhaps the latter had some weight.”
“None, I assure you, as I pressed the matter, and she averred, that love in a cottage with a whisker, was in every way more congenial to her taste, than the finest mansion in the land without that appendage. So you see I took to cultivating whiskers with great assiduity; but for a long time, the rascals defied all attempts to train them; the shoots were tolerably advanced in less than six months; but they were too late—for the lady was married.”
“Well, you are a cool sort of a fellow to talk of transferring your love from one high-born lady to another, with the same ease as a soldier does a feather from his cap. I suppose you finally courted the old housekeeper out of sheer revenge.”
“None of that, I assure you, for she revenged my want of attention that way, by giving Lord Melville a history of the whole matter—with trimmings.—So the old codger said I was as crazy as a bed-bug, and clapped me in the army, as a kind of lunatic asylum to recover my wits. So that’s the end of the story.”
“There, Jerry, put that in your pipe, or your Magazine, just as you like, for no story do I write for a fellow who comes to me with a piece of tape to measure the length, as if a man spun like a spider, and if it don’t fill your three pages—add a paragraph about the children.—What do ye say?”
“It’s rather so-soish at best, Oliver!—But what regiment did you say you were in?”
“Regiment—did I say anything about regiment? You must be mistaken, Jerry! these confounded soldier terms are all mouldering in my brain, these peaceable times.”
“Well, where was the army encamped?”
“At a—a place with a confounded French name—I never had any command of the cursed language, and was glad enough when we got out of the place, never to bother my brain with its name.”