Ravenshoe. By Henry Kingsley.

MR. JACKSON'S BIG TROUT. 397
experience in that way of late, and have come to the conclusion
that, after all, the gentleman and the cad' are one and the same
animal. Now that I am a ruined man, begging my bread about
the streets, I make bold to say to you, sir, hoping that your alms
may be none the less for it, that I am not sure that I do not like
your cad as well as your gentleman in his way. If I play on
the one side such cards as my foster-brother William and Tom
Sparks, you, of course, trump me with John Marston and the
cornet. You are right; but they are all four good fellows. I
have been to hell's gate to learn it. I will resume my narrative.
At Devna the cornet, besides wood-pigeons, shot a francolin —"
It is just as well that this sort of thing did not come on when
Charles was going home alone across the bridge; that is all I
wished to call your attention to..-The next morning, Lord and
Lady Hainault, old Lady Ascot, William, Mary, and Father
Tiernay, were round his bed, watching the hot head rolling from
side to side upon the pillow, and listening to his half-uttered
delirious babble, gazing with a feeling almost of curiosity at the
well-loved face which had eluded them so long.
" O Hainault! Hainault! " said Lady Ascot; "to find him
like this, after all! And Saltire dead without seeing him! And
all my fault! my fault! I am a wicked old woman. God forgive me!"
Lord Hainault got the greatest of the doctors into a corner,
and said, -
"My dear Dr. B-, will he die?"
"Well, yes," said the doctor; " to you I would sooner say yes
than no, the chances are so heavy against him. The surgeons
like the look of things still less than the physicians. You must
really prepare for the worst."
CHAPTER LXII.
MR. JACKSON'S BIG TROUT.
OF course he did not die; I need not tell you that. B —--
and P. H —-- pulled him through, and shook their honest hands
over his bed. Poor B - is reported to have winked on this
occasion; but such a proceeding was so unlike him that I believe
the report must have come round to us through one of the American papers, —probably the same one which represented the