My father went on in this wise excitedly:

'I was laying the foundation of your fortune here, my boy. Heavens!
when I was in that bronze shell I was astonished only at my continence in
not bursting. You have grown,--you have shot up and filled out. I
register my thanks to your grandfather Beltham; the same, in a minor
degree, to Captain Jasper Welsh. Between that man Rippenger and me there
shall be dealings. He flogged you: let that pass. He exposed you to the
contempt of your school-fellows because of a breach in my correspondence
with a base-born ferule-swinger. What are we coming to? Richie, my son,
I was building a future for you here. And Colonel Goodwin-Colonel
Goodwin, you encountered him too, and his marriageable daughter--I owe it
to them that I have you here! Well, in the event of my sitting out the
period this morning as the presentment of Prince Albrecht, I was to have
won something would have astonished that unimpressionable countryman of
ours. Goodness gracious, my boy! when I heard your English shout, it
went to my marrow. Could they expect me to look down on my own flesh and
blood, on my son--my son Richmond--after a separation of years, and
continue a statue? Nay, I followed my paternal impulse. Grant that the
show was spoilt, does the Markgrafin insist on my having a bronze heart
to carry on her pastime? Why, naturally, I deplore a failure, let the
cause be what it will. Whose regrets can eclipse those of the principal
actor? Quotha! as our old Plays have it. Regrets? Did I not for
fifteen minutes and more of mortal time sit in view of a multitude,
motionless, I ask you, like a chiselled block of stone,--and the compact
was one quarter of an hour, and no farther? That was my stipulation. I
told her--I can hold out one quarter of an hour: I pledged myself to it.
Who, then, is to blame? I was exposed to view twenty-three minutes, odd
seconds. Is there not some ancient story of a monstrous wretch baked in