social, had its full indulgence; for there I found, rather to my
surprise, nine-tenths of my most accomplished acquaintance. But the
enemy still made his way; and I had learned to yawn, in spite of
billiards and ball-playing, when _the_ Act let me loose into the great
world again. Good-luck, too, had prepared a surprise for my _debut_. I
had scarcely exhibited myself in the streets, when I discovered that
every man of my _set_ was grown utterly blind whenever I happened to
walk on the same side of the way, and that I might as well have been
buried a century. I was absurd enough to be indignant; for nothing can
be more childish than any delicacy when a man cannot bet on the rubber.
But one morning a knock came to my attic-door which startled me by its
professional vigour. An attorney entered. I had now nothing to fear, for
the man whom no one will trust cannot well be in debt; and for once I
faced an attorney without a palpitation. His intelligence was
flattering. An old uncle of mine, who had worn out all that was human
about him in amassing fifty thousand pounds, and finally died of
starving himself, had expired with the pen in his hand, in the very act
of leaving his thousands to pay the national debt. But fate, propitious
to me, had dried up his ink-bottle; the expense of replenishing it would
have broken his heart of itself; and the attorney's announcement to me
was, that the will, after blinding the solicitor to the treasury and
three of his clerks, was pronounced to be altogether illegible.

The fact that I was the nearest of kin got into the newspapers; and in
my first drive down St. James's, I had the pleasure of discovering that
I had cured a vast number of my friends of their calamitous defect of
vision. But if the "post equitem sedet atra cura" was the maxim in the
days of Augustus, the man who drives the slower cabriolet in the days of
George the Fourth, cannot expect to escape. The "hour too many" overtook
me in the first week. On one memorable evening I saw it coming, just as