a musical instrument and couldn’t learn the English virtue of knowing a good horse when he saw him.  Got through life.  (Heaven only knows how!) without either a biceps or a betting-book.  Had openly acknowledged, in English society, that he didn’t think the barking of a pack of hounds the finest music in the world.  Could go to foreign parts, and see a mountain which nobody had ever got to the top of yet—­and didn’t instantly feel his honor as an Englishman involved in getting to the top of it himself.  Such people may, and do, exist among the inferior races of the Continent.  Let us thank Heaven, Sir, that England never has been, and never will be, the right place for them!

Arrived at Nagle’s Hotel, and finding nobody to inquire of in the hall, Julius applied to the young lady who sat behind the window of “the bar.”  The young lady was reading something so deeply interesting in the evening newspaper that she never even heard him.  Julius went into the coffee-room.

The waiter, in his corner, was absorbed over a second newspaper.  Three gentlemen, at three different tables, were absorbed in a third, fourth, and fifth newspaper.  They all alike went on with their reading without noticing the entrance of the stranger.  Julius ventured on disturbing the waiter by asking for Mr. Geoffrey Delamayn.  At the sound of that illustrious name the waiter looked up with a start.  “Are you Mr. Delamayn’s brother, Sir?”

“Yes.”

The three gentlemen at the tables looked up with a start.  The light of Geoffrey’s celebrity fell, reflected, on Geoffrey’s brother, and made a public character of him.

“You’ll find Mr. Geoffrey, Sir,” said the waiter, in a flurried, excited manner, “at the Cock and Bottle, Putney.”

“I expected to find him here.  I had an appointment with him at this hotel.”

The wait er opened his eyes on Julius with an expression of blank astonishment.  “Haven’t you heard the news, Sir?”

“No!”

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the waiter—­and offered the newspaper.

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the three gentlemen—­and offered the three newspapers.

“What is it?” asked Julius.

“What is it?” repeated the waiter, in a hollow voice.  “The most dreadful thing that’s happened in my time.  It’s all up, Sir, with the great Foot-Race at Fulham.  Tinkler has gone stale.”

The three gentlemen dropped solemnly back into their three chairs, and repeated the dreadful intelligence, in chorus—­“Tinkler has gone stale.”

A man who stands face to face with a great national disaster, and who doesn’t understand it, is a man who will do wisely to hold his tongue and enlighten his mind without asking other people to help him.  Julius accepted the waiter’s newspaper, and sat down to make (if possible) two discoveries:  First, as to whether “Tinkler” did, or did not, mean a man.  Second, as to what particular form of human affliction you implied when you described that man as “gone stale.”