"But sir, you must surely have misunderstood me. I only asked for the
kettle, Mr. Cudmore."

"The devil a more," said Cud, with a sneer.

"Well, then, of course"--

"Well, then, I'll tell you, of course," said he, repeating her words;
"the sorrow taste of the kettle, I'll give you. Call you own skip--Blue
Pether there--damn me, if I'll be your skip any longer."

For the uninitiated I have only to add, that "skip" is the Trinity
College appellation for servant, which was therefore employed by Mr.
Cudmore, on this occasion, as expressing more contemptuously his sense
of the degradation of the office attempted to be put upon him. Having
already informed my reader on some particulars of the company, I leave
him to suppose how Mr. Cudmore's speech was received. Whist itself was
at an end for that evening, and nothing but laughter, long, loud, and
reiterated, burst from every corner of the room for hours after.

As I have so far travelled out of the record of my own peculiar
confessions, as to give a leaf from what might one day form the matter of
Mr. Cudmore's, I must now make the only amende in my power, by honestly
narrating, that short as my visit was to the classic precincts of this
agreeable establishment, I did not escape without exciting my share of
ridicule, though, I certainly had not the worst of the joke, and may,
therefore, with better grace tell the story, which, happily for my
readers, is a very brief one. A custom prevailed in Mrs. Clanfrizzle's
household, which from my unhappy ignorance of boarding-houses, I am
unable to predicate if it belong to the genera at large, or this one