After quitting the army in the abrupt manner stated, I passed some
short time at home, and was tolerated by my mother-in-law, because I
had formed an attachment to a young lady of good connections and with a
considerable fortune, which was really very nearly becoming mine. Mary
M'Alister was the only daughter of Colonel M'Alister, late of the Blues,
and Lady Susan his wife. Her ladyship was no more; and, indeed, of no
family compared to ours (which has refused a peerage any time these two
hundred years); but being an earl's daughter and a Scotchwoman, Lady
Emily Fitz-Boodle did not fail to consider her highly. Lady Susan was
daughter of the late Admiral Earl of Marlingspike and Baron Plumduff.
The Colonel, Miss M'Alister's father, had a good estate, of which his
daughter was the heiress, and as I fished her out of the water upon
a pleasure-party, and swam with her to shore, we became naturally
intimate, and Colonel M'Alister forgot, on account of the service
rendered to him, the dreadful reputation for profligacy which I enjoyed
in the county.

Well, to cut a long story short, which is told here merely for the
moral at the end of it, I should have been Fitz-Boodle M'Alister at this
minute most probably, and master of four thousand a year, but for
the fatal cigar-box. I bear Mary no malice in saying that she was a
high-spirited little girl, loving, before all things, her own way; nay,
perhaps I do not, from long habit and indulgence in tobacco-smoking,
appreciate the delicacy of female organizations, which were oftentimes
most painfully affected by it. She was a keen-sighted little person,
and soon found that the world had belied poor George Fitz-Boodle; who,
instead of being the cunning monster people supposed him to be, was a
simple, reckless, good-humored, honest fellow, marvellously addicted to
smoking, idleness, and telling the truth. She called me Orson, and I