"I am," said Herbert; "but it's a secret."

I assured him of my keeping the secret, and
begged to be favoured with further particulars.
He had spoken so sensibly and feelingly of my
weakness that I wanted to know something
about his strength.

"May I ask the name?" I said.

"Name of Clara," said Herbert.

"Live in London?"

"Yes. Perhaps I ought to mention," said
Herbert, who had become curiously crestfallen
and meek, since we entered on the interesting
theme, "that she is rather below my mother's
nonsensical family notions. Her father had to
do with the victualling of passenger-ships. I
think he was a species of purser."

"What is he now?" said I.

"He's an invalid now," replied Herbert.

"Living on——?"

"On the first floor," said Herbert. Which
was not at all what I meant, for I had intended
my question to apply to his means. " I have
never seen him, for he has always kept his
room overhead, since I have known Clara. But
I have heard him constantly. He makes
tremendous rows— roars, and pegs at the floor with
some frightful instrument." In looking at me
and then laughing heartily, Herbert for the time
recovered his usual lively manner.

"Don't you expect to see him?" said I.

"Oh yes, I constantly expect to see him,"
returned Herbert, "because I never hear him
without expecting him to come tumbling through
the ceiling. But I don't know how long the
rafters may hold."

When he had once more laughed heartily, he
became meek again, and told me that the
moment he began to realise Capital, it was his
intention to marry this young lady. He added
as a self-evident proposition, engendering low
spirits, " But you can't marry, you know, while
you're looking about you."

As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought
what a difficult vision to realise this same Capital
sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets.
A folded piece of paper in one of them attracting
my attention, I opened it and found it to be
the playbill I had received from Joe, relative to
the celebrated provincial amateur of Roscian
renown. "And bless my heart," I involuntarily
added aloud, "it's to-night!"

This changed the subject in an instant, and
made us hurriedly resolve to go to the play. So,
when I had pledged myself to comfort and abet
Herbert in the affair of his heart by all practicable
and impracticable means, and when Herbert
had told me that his affianced already knew
me by reputation and that I should be
presented to her, and when we had warmly shaken
hands upon our mutual confidence, we blew out
our candles, made up our fire, locked our door,
and issued forth in quest of Mr. Wopsle and
Denmark.

CHAPTER XXXI.

ON our arrival in Denmark, we found the
king and queen of that country elevated in
two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a
Court. The whole of the Danish nobility were
in attendance; consisting of a noble boy in the
wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a
venerable Peer with a dirty face who seemed to
have risen from the people late in life, and the
Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair
of white silk legs, and presenting on the whole
a feminine appearance. My gifted townsman
stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I
could have wished that his curls and forehead
had been more probable.

Several curious little circumstances transpired
as the action proceeded. The late king of the
country not only appeared to have been troubled
with a cough at the time of his decease, but to
have taken it with him to the tomb and to have
brought it back. The royal phantom also
carried a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon,
to which it had the appearance of occasionally
referring, and that, too, with an air of anxiety
and a tendency to lose the place of reference
which were suggestive of a state of mortality.
It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade's
being advised by the gallery to "turn over!"
— a recommendation which it took extremely ill.
It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit
that whereas it always appeared with an air of
having been out a long time and walked an
immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely
contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to
be received derisively. The Queen of Denmark,
a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too
much brass about her; her chin being attached
to her diadem by a broad band of that metal
(as if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist
being encircled by another, and each of her arms
by another, so that she was openly mentioned as
"the kettle-drum." The noble boy in the
ancestral boots, was inconsistent; representing
himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
seaman, a strolling actor, a gravedigger, a clergyman,
and a person of the utmost importance at a
Court fencing-match, on the authority of whose
practised eye and nice discrimination the finest
strokes were judged. This gradually led to a
want of toleration for him, and even— on his
being detected in holy orders, and declining to
perform the funeral service— to the general
indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly,
Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical
madness, that when, in course of time, she had taken
off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and
buried it, a sulky man who had been long cooling
his impatient nose against an iron bar in the
front row of the gallery, growled, "Now the
baby's put to bed let's have supper!" which, to
say the least of it, was out of keeping.

Upon my unfortunate townsman all these
incidents accumulated with playful effect. Whenever
that undecided Prince had to ask a question
or state a doubt, the public helped him out
with it. As for example: on the question
whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some
roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to
both opinions said "toss up for it;" and quite