malheureux Charles_. Her little heart poured out its full abundance in
her voluble tongue; and for a quarter of an hour, and it is a long life
for happiness, we were the happiest half dozen in Christendom.

How Mordecai would admire all this, was yet to be told; but my casual
mention of his name broke up the rapture at once. Mariamne suddenly
became sensible of the irregularity of alternately fainting and smiling
in the arms of a handsome young soldier; and in the presence, too, of so
many spectators, all admirers of her black eyes and blooming
sensibilities. She certainly looked to me much prettier than in her
full-dress charms of the evening before, and I almost began to think
that the prize was worth contending for; but the guardsman and the old
general had felt the effects of the morning air, and were
unsentimentally hungry. Mariamne and her attendant were escorted to the
edge of the plantation by her restored knight; and I accepted the
general's invitation to breakfast, instead of drowning myself in the
next pond.

The general was lodged in the first floor of a fisherman's dwelling,
which, in more polished parts of the land, would have been pronounced a
hovel; but in Brighton, as it then was, bore the name of a house. We
entered it through an apartment filled with matters of the fisherman's
trade,--nets, barrels, and grapnels; and in a corner a musket or two,
which had evidently seen service, though probably _not_ in his Majesty's
pay. The walls were covered with engravings of British sea-fights and
favourite admirals, from the days of Elizabeth; patriotic in the highest
degree, and most intolerable specimens of the arts; the floor, too, had
its covering, but it was of nearly a dozen children of all sizes, from
the bluff companion of his father down to the crier in the cradle; yet
all fine bold specimens of the brood of sea and fresh air, British