* * * * *




CHAPTER III


Mr Glowry returned from London with the loss of his lawsuit. Justice
was with him, but the law was against him. He found Scythrop in a
mood most sympathetically tragic; and they vied with each other in
enlivening their cups by lamenting the depravity of this degenerate
age, and occasionally interspersing divers grim jokes about graves,
worms, and epitaphs. Mr Glowry's friends, whom we have mentioned in
the first chapter, availed themselves of his return to pay him a
simultaneous visit. At the same time arrived Scythrop's friend and
fellow-collegian, the Honourable Mr Listless. Mr Glowry had discovered
this fashionable young gentleman in London, 'stretched on the rack of
a too easy chair,' and devoured with a gloomy and misanthropical _nil
curo_, and had pressed him so earnestly to take the benefit of the
pure country air, at Nightmare Abbey, that Mr Listless, finding it
would give him more trouble to refuse than to comply, summoned his
French valet, Fatout, and told him he was going to Lincolnshire. On
this simple hint, Fatout went to work, and the imperials were packed,
and the post-chariot was at the door, without the Honourable Mr
Listless having said or thought another syllable on the subject.

Mr and Mrs Hilary brought with them an orphan niece, a daughter of Mr
Glowry's youngest sister, who had made a runaway love-match with an
Irish officer. The lady's fortune disappeared in the first year: love,