“D——­n the fellow, his metaphysics are making him [Transcriber’s Note:  missing part of this word] dent,” cried W——­pe.

“Why, you don’t see where they hit,” said S——­th drawlingly.  “Somewhere about the pineal; and therefore we say impudence is moral, sometimes immoral, as just now when you damned me.  No more of your old junk, I say, sitting here in my cathedra, which by the way is spring-bottomed, which may account for my moral elasticity that a highwayman is a coward.”

“Well,” cried S——­k, starting up.  “I’ll deposit a pound with W——­pe, on a bet that you’ll not take sixpence from the first bumpkin we meet on the road, by the old watchword, ‘Stand and deliver;’ and you’ll have the gun to boot.”

“Ay, that’s a physical bribe,” cried W——­pe; and, after pausing a little, “The fellow flinches.”

“And surely the reverse must hold,” added S——­k, “that, being a coward, he must be a highwayman.”

“Why, you see, gents,” said S——­th coolly, “I don’t mind a very great deal, you know, though I do take said sixpence from said bumpkin; but I won’t do it, you know, on compulsion.”

“If there’s no compulsion, there’s no robbery,” said S——­k.

“Oh, I mean your compulsion.  As for mine, exercised on said bumpkin, let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your compulsion, if you love me.  I can do anything, but not upon compulsion, you know.”

“Done then!”

“Why, ye-e-s,” drawled S——­th, “done; I may say, gents, done; but I say with Sir John, don’t misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know.”

“Your own free will,” shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in the world of dithyrambics.  “Here’s your instrument for extorting the sixpence by force or fear.”

And this young man, half inebriated—­with, we may here say parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James’ Square, with one son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who trusted to her son for being the means of her support—­qualified, as we have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add, though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration—­took willingly into his hand the old rusty “Innes,” to perpetrate upon the highway a robbery.  And would he do it?  You had only to look upon his face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution—­the steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism, well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance.  What if that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, had seen him now!