“When I find myself attacked by footpads I’ll just look up Mr. James Brown,” I told him dryly with intent to plague.
He took the name sourly, no doubt in an itching to blurt out that he was a Mac-something or other. To a Gaelic gentleman like him the Sassenach name he used for a convenience was gall and wormwood.
We walked down the street together, and where our ways parted near Arlington Street he gave me his hand.
“The lucky man am I at meeting you, Mr. Montagu, while we were having the bit splore down the street. I was just weanying for a lad handy with his blade, and the one I would be choosing out of all England came hot-foot round the corner.”
I made nothing of what I had done, but yet his Highland friendliness and flatteries were balm to a sick heart and we parted at my door with a great deal of good-will.
The author takes an early opportunity to express his obligations to the letters of Horace Walpole who was himself so infinitely indebted to the conversation of his cronies.