rejoiced to learn you had taken what I was sure would prove the right
direction; and finally I gained the clew to that villanous inn, by the
report of the post-boys who had taken Miss Trevanion's carriage there,
and met you on the road. On reaching the inn I found two fellows
conferring outside the door. They sprang in as we drove up, but not
before my servant Summers--a quick fellow, you know, who has travelled
with me from Norway to Nubia--had quitted his seat and got into the
house, into which I followed him with a step, you dog, as active as your
own! Egad! I was twenty-one then! Two fellows had already knocked
down poor Summers, and showed plenty of fight. Do you know," said the
marquis, interrupting himself with an air of serio-comic humiliation--
"do you know that I actually--no, you never will believe it; mind, 't is
a secret--actually broke my cane over one fellows shoulders? Look!"
(and the marquis held up the fragment of the lamented weapon). "And I
half suspect, but I can't say positively, that I had even the necessity
to demean myself by a blow with the naked hand,--clenched too! Quite
Eton again; upon my honor it was! Ha, ha!"

And the marquis--whose magnificent proportions, in the full vigor of
man's strongest, if not his most combative, age, would have made him a
formidable antagonist even to a couple of prize-fighters, supposing he
had retained a little of Eton skill in such encounters--laughed with the
glee of a schoolboy, whether at the thought of his prowess; or his sense
of the contrast between so rude a recourse to primitive warfare, and his
own indolent habits and almost feminine good temper. Composing himself,
however, with the quick recollection how little I could share his
hilarity, he resumed gravely, "It took us some time, I don't say to
defeat our foes, but to bind them, which I thought a necessary
precaution; one fellow, Trevanion's servant, all the while stunning me
with quotations from Shakspeare. I then gently laid hold of a gown, the