totally discrediting the evidence of my senses?"

"Perhaps I can suggest a middle course," said Trevanion; "lend me,
therefore, a patient hearing for a few moments, and I may be able to
throw some light upon this difficult matter. You may never have heard
that there is, in this same city of Paris, a person so extremely like
your cousin Guy, that his most intimate friends have daily mistaken one
for the other, and this mistake has the more often been made, from the
circumstances of their both being in the habit of frequenting the same
class in society, where, knowing and walking with the same people, the
difficulty of discriminating has been greatly increased. This
individual, who has too many aliases for one to know which to
particularise him by, is one of that numerous order of beings whom a
high state of civilization is always engendering and throwing up on the
surface of society; he is a man of low birth and mean connexions, but
gifted with most taking manners and an unexceptionable address and
appearance; these advantages, and the possession of apparently
independent means, have opened to him the access to a certain set of
people, who are well known and well received in society, and obtained for
him, what he prizes much more, the admission into several clubs where
high play is carried on. In this mixed assemblage, which sporting habits
and gambling, (that grand leveller of all distinctions,) have brought
together, this man and your cousin Guy met frequently, and, from the
constant allusion to the wonderful resemblance between them, your
eccentric cousin, who, I must say, was never too select in his
acquaintances, frequently amused himself by practical jokes upon their
friends, which served still more to nurture the intimacy between them;
and from this habit, Mr. Dudley Morewood, for such is his latest
patronymic, must have enjoyed frequent opportunities of hearing much of
your family and relations, a species of information he never neglected,