cate nerves disturbed by the odour exhaled from Messrs. Day and Martin's blacking, had poured the esprit de vanille over the pumps with which he attended a neighbouring dancing-school.
Great was the indignation excited. With the fear of a lost legacy before their eyes, his mother burnt the shoes—his father took the horsewhip—when Colonel Boyne interfered, with a eulogium on the naturally fine taste of the boy, and a petition to adopt a youth whose predilections were so promising.
A week afterwards, the Colonel left for London, and with him Francis—the grief for whose departure was such as is generally felt by mothers on the marriage of their daughters, or fathers at the loss of supernumerary sons. Colonel Boyne took a house in Duchess Street, and a pretty housekeeper—walked St. James's and Bond Streets—kept both wig and whisker in a state of dark-brown preservation—and wore Hoby's boots to the last. Francis had too much of the parasite in his nature ever to loose his original hold; and after a few years of dread, touching a lady and her daughter who lived opposite, and spent an unjustifiable part of their time at the window—and some occasional terrors of the housekeeper, his cousin
