That night, and at the witching hour, when men and women tell each other everything, (in the strictest confidence), they in their dormitories, and we in our smoke-rooms, I revealed my misery to my friend Frank C--------, who happened happily to be staying with me. Frank has Irish blood in his veins, and his first impulse was to have “a crack at the Viscount,” but he ultimately took a less truculent view of the case, and suggested brandy and water. From this source, and “from the cool cisterns of the midnight air,” for we were smoking our cigars out of doors, “our spirits drank repose,” and we finally resolved “to banish my regret,” and to replenish our sketch-books, by a fortnight's tour in Ireland.
FORTHWITH, I put myself into active training, and got into splendid condition for doing “justice to Ireland.” I read Moore's Melodies; I played Nora Creina upon the flute, not perhaps with that rapidity which is usual outside the Peepshows, but with much more expression; I discoursed with reapers; I tried to pronounce Drogheda, till I was nearly black in the face; I drank whiskey-punch (subsequently discovered to be Hollands); I ate Irish stew (a dish never heard of in that country) and I bought the sweetest thing in portmanteaus, with drawers, trays, pockets, compartments, recesses, straps, and buckles, more than enough to drive that traveller mad, who should forget where he had placed his razors. Amid these preparations, I am ashamed to state, that I became disgracefully oblivious of my little disappointment in the shrubberies, and soon realised the Chinese maxim, more truthful than genteel,--“the dog that is idle barks at his fleas, but he that is hunting feels them not.” Indeed, to make my confession complete, and to descend the staircase of inconstancy to the lowest depth of humiliation, I must acknowledge that on the day of our departure I fell violently in love at Crewe Station, whence my heart was borne away, in the direction of Derby, by the loveliest girl, that is to say, one of the loveliest girls, that ever beautified an express train.
I begin to fear that my unhappy tendencies to this kind of fierce, but fugitive attachment, have not been at all improved by communion with Mr. Thomas Moore, and I tremble to find myself listening complacently to the fickle philosophies of Marmontel,--“_Quand on na pas ce que ion aime, il faut aimer ce que l'on a._”