to-night," said one of a group of young dandies who were leaning over
the velvet-cushioned balconies of the "Coventry Club," smoking their
full-flavored Cubas (from Hudson's) after the opera.

Everybody stared at such an exclamation of enthusiasm from the lips
of the young Earl of Bagnigge, who was never heard to admire anything
except a coulis de dindonneau a la St. Menehould, or a supreme de
cochon en torticolis a la Piffarde; such as Champollion, the chef of
the "Traveller's," only knows how to dress; or the bouquet of a flask of
Medoc, of Carbonell's best quality; or a goutte of Marasquin, from the
cellars of Briggs and Hobson.

Alured de Pentonville, eighteenth Earl of Bagnigge, Viscount Paon of
Islington, Baron Pancras, Kingscross, and a Baronet, was, like too
many of our young men of ton, utterly blase, although only in his
twenty-fourth year. Blest, luckily, with a mother of excellent
principles (who had imbued his young mind with that Morality which is so
superior to all the vain pomps of the world!) it had not been always the
young earl's lot to wear the coronet for which he now in sooth cared so
little. His father, a captain of Britain's navy, struck down by the
side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy, left little but his
sword and spotless name to his young, lovely, and inconsolable widow,
who passed the first years of her mourning in educating her child in an
elegant though small cottage in one of the romantic marine villages of
beautiful Devonshire. Her child! What a gush of consolation filled the
widow's heart as she pressed him to it! How faithfully did she instil
into his young bosom those principles which had been the pole-star of
the existence of his gallant father!

In this secluded retreat, rank and wealth almost boundless found the