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 first as coy as she is in town. For half an hour I thought on the impudence of my maid, for another half on the folly of myself.

"Bab," I soliloquised at the end of an hour's meditation on this entertaining theme, "you should be whipt through every market town in Yorkshire. You are worse than an incorrigible rogue, you are an incorrigible fool; but any way at nine o'clock to-morrow morning you shall dismiss Mrs. Polly Emblem without a character."

Had it not been that I had ratafia to compose me I doubt whether I should have had any sleep at all. The fear of discovery lay upon me like a stone. I was persuaded that we had been spied upon. Slumber, however, mercifully drew a curtain round the miserable consequences embodied in the future.

Emblem's light hand woke me.

"Ten o'clock, your la'ship," says she.

The red sun was in a station over the tree tops in the east, and sent cold rays across the winter vapours of the park through one corner of my window. I sipped my chocolate, and hoped the rebel was not abroad yet.

"He is," the maid said; "nought would restrain him. At seven o'clock he knocked me up and made me get him towels and cold water for his tub; at eight o'clock, my lady, he made me paint his face, friz his hair a bit, put his headdress on, and arrange all the points in what he called his 'feminine machinery'; at nine he was drinking ale and eating of