'Does he canter well?' asks Sheridan, with a look of business.

'Like Pegasus himself.'

'If that's the case, I shouldn't mind, Holloway, stretching a point for
him. Do you mind showing me his paces?'

'Not at all,' replies the lawyer, only too happy to show off his own:
and touching up the horse, put him to a quiet canter. The moment is not
to be lost; the churchyard gate is at hand; Sheridan slips in, knowing
that his mounted tormentor cannot follow him, and there bursts into a
roar of laughter, which is joined in by Kelly, but not by the returning
Holloway.

[Illustration: "A TREASURE FOR A LADY"--SHERIDAN AND THE LAWYER.]

But if he escaped an importunate lawyer once in a way like this, he
Required more ingenuity to get rid of the limbs of the law, when they
came, as they did frequently in his later years. It was the fashionable
thing in bygone novels of the 'Pelham' school, and Even in more recent
comedies, to introduce a well-dressed sheriff's officer at a dinner
party or ball, and take him through a variety of predicaments, ending,
at length, in the revelation of his real character; and probably some
such scene is still enacted from time to time in the houses of the
extravagant: but Sheridan's adventures with bailiffs seem to have
excited more attention. In the midst of his difficulties he never ceased
to entertain his friends, and 'why should he not do so, since he had not
to pay?' 'Pay your bills, sir? what a shameful waste of money!' he once
said. Thus, one day a young friend was met by him and taken back to