matter of business and duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of
his, way to call at Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not
to alarm the heiress.

A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the
shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an
heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and
the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride, all the
habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by that
stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her father
with the mere lowering of her eyelids. Conceive the highest bidder at an
auction hearing the article announce that it will not have him! Captain
Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:--the girl could not
know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he requested the world
to partake of his astonishment. Chronicles of the season in London
informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom the gates were shut.
She could hardly be thinking of Nevil? However, let the epistle be read.
'Now for the Shrapnel shot,' he nodded finally to Colonel Halkett,
expanded his bosom, or natural cuirass, as before-mentioned, and was
vocable above the common pitch:--

'"MY BRAVE BEAUCHAMP,--On with your mission, and never a summing of
results in hand, nor thirst for prospects, nor counting upon