with his seamed yellowness and blinking grin; for a long time he
coquetted at her, and played peep-bo, without disturbing her gravity,
making humorous side comments to the on-lookers meanwhile. There was a
ragged and disorderly mop of gray hair on his head, which showed very
dingy beside the clear auburn of the child's. One felt a repulsion
from him, and yet, as he chatted and smirked and acted, there was a
sort of fascination in him, too. Some original force and fire of
nature still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human
stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality.
Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon
which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and
exclaimed, "There--there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves me--she
loves me!" He then permitted her to slip down from his knee and
withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk which our entrance had
interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom we youngsters knew
nothing--though our ignorance only argued ourselves unknown, for he
named persons all famous in their day. He had seen George IV.,
Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with Coleridge,
De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of elder
brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he had quaffed
mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors shoulder to
shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his familiar
stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his finger-ends;
he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if there were
any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage we
desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was
the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been
utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the
first half of the last century; he was such a character as could
flourish only in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in