in the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his
disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: 'I begin to be of Russett's
opinion, that his fault is his honesty.' The rascal had won or partly
won the empress of her sex! This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most
fastidious of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of
the tramp's borrowed plumes! Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory
word on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.

Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of
Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long
since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable. Thither one fair
June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her
beautiful cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what
were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to
conduct them,--merely a parade of observation once round;--the ladies
veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of
whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my
lord's pugilist, Christopher Ives.

Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History is.

The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds for
supposing they assumed airs of state in the style of a previous
generation. Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no
less than the famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing
Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his
anecdotes, both inexhaustible, proved, as he said, 'that a dried fish is
no stale fish, and a smoky flavour to an old chimney story will often
render it more piquant to the taste than one jumping fresh off the
incident.' His exact meaning in 'smoky flavour' we are not to know; but