“‘O, madam,’ continued Brady, ‘the fact is, that the Paris ladies were rather too fond of us English. When I say English, I mean Scotch and Irish as well; but, nevertheless, I think Irishmen had more good-luck than the natives of the other two islands.’
“‘In my geography book,’ said Miss Dosy, ‘it is put down only as one island, consisting of England, capital London, on the Thames, in the south; and Scotland, capital Edinburgh, on the Forth, in the north; population’——
“‘Gad! you are right,’ said Brady—‘perfectly right, Miss Macnamara. I see you are quite a blue. But, as I was saying, it is scarce possible for a good-looking young English officer to escape the French ladies. And then I played rather deep—on the whole, however, I think, I may say I won. Mortgageshire and I broke Frascati’s one night—we won a hundred thousand francs at rouge, and fifty-four thousand at roulette. You would have thought the croupiers would have fainted; they tore their hair with vexation. The money, however, soon went again—we could not keep it. As for wine, you have it cheap there, and of a quality which you cannot get in England. At Very’s, for example, I drank chambertin—it is a kind of claret—for three francs two sous a-bottle, which was, beyond all comparison, far superior to what I drank, a couple of months ago, at the Duke of Devonshire’s, though his Grace prides himself on that very wine, and sent to a particular binn for a favourite specimen, when I observed to him I had tasted better in Paris. Out of politeness, I pretended to approve of his Grace’s choice; but I give you my honour—only I would not wish it to reach his Grace’s ears—it was not to be compared to what I had at Very’s for a moment.’
“So flowed on Brady for a couple of hours. The Tooleries, as he thought proper to call them; the Louvre, with its pictures, the removal of which he deplored as a matter of taste, assuring us that he had used all his influence with the Emperor of Russia and the Duke of Wellington to prevent it, but in vain; the Boulevards, the opera, the theatres, the Champs Elysées, the Montagnes Russes—everything, in short, about Paris, was depicted to the astonished mind of Miss Dosy. Then came London—where he belonged to I do not know how many clubs—and cut a most distinguished figure in the fashionable world. He was of the Prince Regent’s set, and assured us, on his honour, that there was never anything so ill-founded as the stories afloat to the discredit of that illustrious person. But on what happened at Carlton House, he felt obliged to keep silence, the Prince being remarkably strict in exacting a premise from every gentleman whom he admitted to his table, not to divulge anything that occurred there—a violation of which promise was the cause of the exclusion of Brummell. As for the Princess of Wales, he would rather not say anything.
“And so forth. Now, in those days of my innocence, I believed these stories as gospel, hating the fellow all the while from the bottom of my heart, as I saw that he made a deep impression on Dosy, who sat in open-mouthed wonder, swallowing them down as a common-councilman swallows turtle. But times are changed. I have seen Paris and London since, and I believe I know both villages as well as most men, and the deuce a word of truth did Brady tell in his whole narrative. In Paris, when not in quarters (he had joined some six or eight months after Waterloo), he lived au cinquantième in a dog-hole in the Rue Git-le-Cœur (a street at what I may call the Surrey side of Paris), among carters and other such folk; and in London I discovered that his principal domicile was in one of the courts now demolished to make room for the fine new gimcrackery at Charing Cross; it was in Round Court, at a pieman’s of the name of Dudfield.”
“Dick Dudfield?” said Jack Ginger; “I knew the man well—a most particular friend of mine. He was a duffer besides being a pieman, and was transported some years ago. He is now a flourishing merchant in Australasia, and will, I suppose, in due time be grandfather to a member of Congress.”
“There it was that Brady lived then,” continued Bob Burke, “when he was hobnobbing with Georgius Quartus, and dancing at Almack’s with Lady Elizabeth Conynghame. Faith, the nearest approach he ever made to royalty was when he was put into the King’s own Bench, where he sojourned many a long day. What an ass I was to believe a word of such stuff! but, nevertheless, it goes down with the rustics to the present minute. I sometimes sport a duke or so myself, when I find myself among yokels, and I rise vastly in estimation by so doing. What do we come to London or Paris for, but to get some touch of knowing how to do things properly? It would be devilish hard, I think, for Ensign Brady, or Ensign Brady’s master, to do me nowadays by flamming off titles of high life.”
The company did no more than justice to Mr Burke’s experience, by unanimously admitting that such a feat was all but impossible.
“I was,” he went on, “a good deal annoyed at my inferiority, and I could not help seeing that Miss Dosy was making comparisons that were rather odious, as she glanced from the gay uniform of the Ensign on my habiliments, which having been perpetrated by a Mallow tailor with a hatchet, or pitchfork, or pickaxe, or some such tool, did not stand the scrutiny to advantage. I was, I think, a better-looking fellow than Brady. Well, well—laugh if you like. I am no beauty, I know; but then, consider that what I am talking of was sixteen years ago, and more; and a man does not stand the battering I have gone through for these sixteen years with impunity. Do you call the thirty or forty thousand tumblers of punch, in all its varieties, that I have since imbibed, nothing?”
“Yes,” said Jack Ginger, with a sigh, “there was a song we used to sing on board the Brimstone, when cruising about the Spanish main—