who has come to bowse with us to-night. 'Gad, we'll show him that old
ale's none the worse for keeping company with the moon's darlings.
Come, sit down, sit down. Where's the cloth, ye ill-mannered loons,
and the knives and platters? Have we no holiday customs for
strangers, think ye? Mim, my cove, off to my caravan; bring out the
knives, and all other rattletraps; and harkye, my cuffin, this small
key opens the inner hole, where you will find two barrels; bring one
of them. I'll warrant it of the best, for the brewer himself drank
some of the same sort but two hours before I nimm'd them. Come,
stump, my cull, make yourself wings. Ho, Dame Bingo, is not that pot
of thine seething yet? Ah, my young gentleman, you commence betimes;
so much the better; if love's a summer's day, we all know how early a
summer morning begins," added the jovial Egyptian in a lower voice
(feeling perhaps that he was only understood by himself), as he gazed
complacently on the youth, who, with that happy facility of making
himself everywhere at home so uncommon to his countrymen, was already
paying compliments suited to their understanding to two fair daughters
of the tribe who had entered with the new-comers. Yet had he too much
craft or delicacy, call it which you will, to continue his addresses
to that limit where ridicule or jealousy from the male part of the
assemblage might commence; on the contrary, he soon turned to the men,
and addressed them with a familiarity so frank and so suited to their
taste that he grew no less rapidly in their favour than he had already
done in that of the women, and when the contents of the two caldrons
were at length set upon the coarse but clean cloth which in honour of
his arrival covered the sod, it was in the midst of a loud and
universal peal of laughter which some broad witticism of the young
stranger had produced that the party sat down to their repast.

Bright were the eyes and sleek the tresses of the damsel who placed