Upon my subsequently mentioning the above adventure to Jack Withers, it will hardly be credited that this villain without shame at once roundly asserted that, when I left him on the afore-mentioned night, I was at least three sheets and three quarters in the wind; adding with praiseworthy candour, that he himself was so far gone as to be obliged, to the infinite scandal of his staid old housekeeper, to creep up stairs _à quatre pieds_, in order to gain his bedroom.
Now this latter may be true enough, for it is probable that friend Jack freshened his nip a trifle after my departure, seeing that he was always something of a drunken knave. As for his calumnious and scandalous declaration, that _I_ was in the least degree tipsy, it is too ridiculous to be noticed. I scorn it with my heels--I was sober--sober, cool, and steady as the north star; and he that is inclined to question this solemn asseveration, let him send me his card; and if I don't drill a hole in his doublet before he's forty-eight hours older, then, as honest Slender has it, "I would I might never come in mine own great chamber again else."
We learn from good authority that Lord TAMBOFF STANLEY, in answer to a deputation from Scotland, assured the gentlemen who waited upon him that "the subject of _emigration_ was under the serious consideration of Her Majesty's Ministers." We hope that those respectable gentlemen may soon resolve upon their departure--we care not "what clime they wander to, so not again to _this_;" or, as Shakspeare says, let them "stand not upon the order of their going, but GO." The country, we take it upon ourselves to say, will remember them when they are gone; they have left the nation too many weighty proofs of their regard to be forgotten in a hurry--Corruption, Starvation, and Taxation, and the National Debt by way of
[Illustration: A HANDSOME LEG--I SEE (LEGACY).]
Peter Borthwick, late of the Royal Surrey Nautical, having had the honour of "deep damnation" conferred upon his "taking off" the character of Prince Henry, upon that occasion, to appear in unison with the text of the Immortal Bard, "dressed" the part in a most elaborate "neck-or-nothing tile." Upon being expostulated with by the manager, he triumphantly referred to the description of the chivalrous Prince in which the narrator particularly states--