‘The man!’ it was answered to him.  ’But you? and near our old school—­Viscount Harrington?  These marvels occur, you see—­we meet again by night.’

Evan, with little gratification at the meeting, fell into their former comradeship; tickled by a recollection of his old schoolfellow’s India-rubber mind.

Mr. Raikes stood about a head under him.  He had extremely mobile features; thick, flexible eyebrows; a loose, voluble mouth; a ridiculous figure on a dandified foot.  He represented to you one who was rehearsing a part he wished to act before the world, and was not aware that he took the world into his confidence.

How he had come there his elastic tongue explained in tropes and puns and lines of dramatic verse.  His patrimony spent, he at once believed himself an actor, and he was hissed off the stage of a provincial theatre.

’Ruined, the last ignominy endured, I fled from the gay vistas of the Bench—­for they live who would thither lead me! and determined, the day before the yesterday—­what think’st thou? why to go boldly, and offer myself as Adlatus to blessed old Cudford!  Yes! a little Latin is all that remains to me, and I resolved, like the man I am, to turn, hic, hac, hoc, into bread and cheese, and beer:  Impute nought foreign to me, in the matter of pride.’

‘Usher in our old school—­poor old Jack!’ exclaimed Evan.

‘Lieutenant in the Cudford Academy!’ the latter rejoined.  ’I walked the distance from London.  I had my interview with the respected principal.  He gave me of mutton nearest the bone, which, they say, is sweetest; and on sweet things you should not regale in excess.  Endymion watched the sheep that bred that mutton!  He gave me the thin beer of our boyhood, that I might the more soberly state my mission.  That beer, my friend, was brewed by one who wished to form a study for pantomimic masks.  He listened with the gravity which is all his own to the recital of my career; he pleasantly compared me to Phaethon, congratulated the river Thames at my not setting it on fire in my rapid descent, and extended to me the three fingers of affectionate farewell.  “You an usher, a rearer of youth, Mr. Raikes?  Oh, no!  Oh, no!” That was all I could get out of him.  ’Gad! he might have seen that I didn’t joke with the mutton-bone.  If I winced at the beer it was imperceptible.  Now a man who can do that is what I call a man in earnest.’

‘You’ve just come from Cudford?’ said Evan.

’Short is the tale, though long the way, friend Harrington.  From Bodley is ten miles to Beckley.  I walked them.  From Beckley is fifteen miles to Fallowfield.  Them I was traversing, when, lo! near sweet eventide a fair horsewoman riding with her groom at her horse’s heels.  “Lady,” says I, addressing her, as much out of the style of the needy as possible, “will you condescend to direct me to Fallowfield?”—­“Are you going to the match?” says she.  I answered boldly that I was.  “Beckley’s in,”