Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/33

 again! Ho! the trellises of China--come forth, Confucius, and Commissioner Yeh! Passing a few paces, we are in the land of the Zegri and Abencerrage:

'Land of the dark-eyed maid and dusky Moor.'

Mr. Poole's house is called Alhambra Villa! Moorish verandahs--plate-glass windows, with cusped heads and mahogany sashes--a garden behind, a smaller one in front--stairs ascending to the doorway under a Saracenic portico, between two pedestalled lions that resemble poodles--the whole new and lustrous--in semblance stone, in substance stucco-cracks in the stucco denoting "settlements." But the house being let for ninety-nine years--relet again on a running lease of seven, fourteen, and twenty-one--the builder is not answerable for duration, nor the original lessee for repairs. Take it altogether, than Alhambra Villa masonry could devise no better type of modern taste and metropolitan speculation.

Mr. Poole, since we saw him between four and five years ago, has entered the matrimonial state. He has married a lady of some money, and become a reformed man. He has eschewed the turf, relinquished Belcher neckcloths and Newmarket coats-dropped his old-bachelor acquaintances. When a man marries and reforms, especially when marriage and reform are accompanied with increased income, and settled respectably in Alhambra Villa--relations, before estranged, tender kindly overtures: the world, before austere, becomes indulgent. It was so with Poole--no longer Dolly. Grant that in earlier life he had fallen into bad ways, and, among equivocal associates, had been led on by that taste for sporting which is a manly though a perilous characteristic of the true-born Englishman; he who loves horses is liable to come in contact with blacklegs; the racer is a noble animal; but it is his misfortune that the better his breeding the worse his company:--Grant that, in the stables, Adolphus Samuel Poole had picked up some wild oats--he had sown them now. Bygones were bygones. He had made a very prudent marriage. Mrs. Poole was a sensible woman--had rendered him domestic, and would keep him straight! His uncle Samuel, a most worthy man, had found him that sensible woman, and, having found her, had paid his nephew's debts, and adding a round sum to the lady's fortune, had