"I am still at Chillingham Park, with our kind friends; but I must be home in Scotland for the Lanarkshire steeple-chase on Beltane day. There will be some queer jockeyship in the mounts, I fear. Four miles distance will be the run, including thirteen stone walls, four rough burns, two water leaps, and six-and-twenty most infernal fences. I know the course well--by Gryffwraes and Waterlee. (All this stuff, thought I, and not one word of Louisa!) Old Slubber is to be made a marquis, it seems, so the countess talks nothing but 'peerage'--Douglas and Debrett, Lodge, and Sir Bernard Burke. It is all noble 'shop,' and we poor commoners have not the shadow of a chance!
"Slubber is an old humbug; I am as old as he is, perhaps; but I don't wear my hat in the nape of my neck, or use goloshes and an umbrella--never had one in all my life. I don't mount my horse with the aid of a groom, and ride him as if I was afraid he'd take it into his head to run up a tree. I don't take dinner pills and Seltzer water on the sly from the butler; and my stomach, thank God, is not like his--a more delicate piece of machinery than Cora's French watch; for I can take a jolly curler's dinner of salt beef and greens, and can rush my horse at a six-foot wall neck and neck with the lightest lad in your troop.
"So why he's made a marquis, the devil, and that Scoto-Russian, Lord Aberdeen, on whose policy he always gobbles like a turkey-cock, only know."
Sir Nigel's ridicule of Slubber consoled me a little for his omitting the dear name of Louisa. I knew that it was my regard for her that inspired his chief dislike for the lord. But why was the good-hearted baronet so vituperative? Was the senile peer really likely to become a successful lover? Save by the side of his mistress, a lover is never content.
We pass the scattered isles of Cyclades, That, scarce distinguished seemed to stud the seas. The shouts of sailors double near the shores, They stretch their canvas, and they ply their oars. Full on the promised land at length we bore, With joy descending on the Cretan shore. DRYDEN.--_Translation of Æn._ iii.
We were favoured by Æolus. One might have supposed that Captain Robert Binnacle had succeeded to the bag of wind which that airy monarch gave to the wise and gentle king of Ithaca. Thus a few days more saw our transport amid the Isles of Greece as she bore through the Archipelago.