Page:The youth of Washington (1910).djvu/229

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his sister—a pretty thing she was—spent all her money at cards and hanged herself, the man said: "Poor Fanny, I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up." Horace Walpole says, when she meant to die, she wrote with a diamond on the window-pane this out of Garth's "Dispensary":

"To die is landing on some silent shore,
Where billows never break nor tempests roar."

But why should the woman die when she had a diamond left to gamble with?

However, the Duke of Cumberland is his patron, and that is enough. F——x lost the other night at White's, they say, £1000 and—


I looked up and said: "The rest does not seem to be of interest or to say more of the general."

"No, but always look at the postscript of a lady's letter. There is more about your general."

It was true, for I read:


P.S. I meant not to tell you of Braddock's affair with Colonel Gumley, who was his friend, but I may as well, even if you think it incredible. A letter is a fine way to talk, because you can never see the blush you may cause, and may fib without being vexed by contradiction until so long after that you have forgotten all about