pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of wilder
extravagances. To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing was too
much, because any absurdity was anticipated. And the earl's readiness to
be complimented on the shop's particular merits, his gratified air at an
allusion to it, whirled the fun faster. He seemed entirely unconscious
that each step he now took wakened peals.

For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist
for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more
laughable if not in himself a laughable object. The earl's handsome
figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque of
his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in state-
according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that they were
not strictly divisible. Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley Potts drew
into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from Whitechapel.
She said it a little nervously, but without blushing. Always on the side
of the joke, he could ask: 'Who can doubt?' Indeed, scepticism poisoned
the sport.

The Old Buccaneer has written: Friends may laugh; I am not roused. My
enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night.

Our enemy's laugh at us rouses to wariness, he would say. He can barely
mean, that a condition of drowsihead is other than providently warned by
laughter of friends. An old warrior's tough fibre would, perhaps, be
insensible to that small crackle. In civil life, however, the friend's
laugh at us is the loudest of the danger signals to stop our course: and
the very wealthy nobleman, who is known for not a fool, is kept from
hearing it. Unless he does hear it, he can have no suspicion of its
being about him: he cannot imagine such 'lese-majeste' in the subservient