pages to himself in tradesmen's ledgers; to
frequent occult chambers where ivory cubes
were nightly rattled in cylindrical boxes, and
seven was the main and five to four were on
the caster; to be put, in fine, to the thousand
shifts and embarrassments that a pauper gentleman,
utterly unemployed, thoroughly uneducated
for any useful purpose, hopelessly
idle, and passably debauched, must needs
suffer when he cannot dig and when to beg he
is ashamed.  Yes; he had formed one of the
famous band of heroes recruited from the
docks and the slums, and officered Heaven
and the Insolvent Court only knows how,
who went out to Spain, and were flogged
and not paid, and, as wicked wags reported,
once ran away en masse from a small body of
Carlists, who were instructed to cry out
" Stop thief! " which so terrified the worthy
legionaries, that they, remembering the adage,
" the thief doth fear each bush an officer,"
bolted without further delay.  Who does not
remember these poor fellows when they came
home, all as tattered and torn as the bridegroom
of the maiden all forlorn ?  They
begged about, they appeared at police offices,
they swept the streets till the professional
beggars found out what a capital dodge the
legionary one was, and took to stumped
brooms and ragged red jackets.  Who does
not recollect the unhappy captains— the De
Montmorency Ravelins ?  Every second-hand
clothes-shop had one of their swallow-tailed
scarlet-coats hanging up outside, with the
Queen of Spain's buttons and the Queen of
Spain's epaulettes.  Some of the Ravelins
were on the Carlist side, and were in worse
case than the Christinos.  They were the
terror of tailors ; lodging-house keepers
groaned when you mentioned their names ;
waiters called them, sarcastically, " Capting."
The Spanish legionary captain was almost as
poorly off as a Pole ; and touching the
degree of estimation in which those unfortunate
refugees were held, from the
year 'thirty-five to forty, I will relate what
my aunt said.  My aunt had a niece who
was in love with a handsome young man,
an artist, but whose name unfortunately
ended in wowski.  Marriage was spoken of,
when up and spoke my aunt, who never
before was heard to speak so harshly, and
said:
"I hope, my dear, you are not going to
marry anybody whose name ends in wowski,
because he must be a Pole, and all Poles are
swindlers."
And my aunt was a dear good woman,
who would not have harmed a worm, or
spoken disrespectfully of a Barbary monkey.

About this time, too, the stage took up the
captain and made much sport of him.  The
playwrights converted him, invariably, into
an Irishman, gave him a blue-frogged coat,
brass spurs, white trousers, and false
moustachios, one of which last came off towards the
dénouement.  He was always an intriguing
adventurer, had frequently been transported,
ordinarily passed under a false name, and
was generally removed in custody by a
policeman, or kicked down-stairs by the
footman at the end of the farce.  Captain
grew to be a bye-word and reproach.  A
bilker of taverns and victimiser of lodging-houses
was a captain.  The penny-a-liners
revelled in him, and headed their reports,
The Notorious Captain in Trouble ; Captain
L——Again;  A Certain Gallant Captain
has been Repeating his Infamous Tricks
in Hampshire ; and the like.  The captain
rivalled the penny-a-liner's other bread-provider;
the gallant, gay Lothario.

But, the captains grew so scarce at last
that the farce-writers dropped them in contempt,
and the penny-a-liners devoted themselves
to Magyar noblemen.  Some of the
Ravelins went back to Spain, to find out
coal-mines in the gorges of the Pyrenees.
Some took commission agencies for Toboso's
hams and the Duke of Garbanzo's sherries —
like Captain Strong, whom Pendennis
knew.  Many went to America, where they
went filibustering or beaver-trapping, and
sometimes came back and published their
Far Western Travels in three volumes, and
sometimes fell by the hand of a Mexican
hangman, like poor dear Raousset Boulbon.
A few had shares in patents— machines for
spinning flax from cobwebs, and extracting
crimson dyes from egg-shells.  One I knew
went to California with a venture of lucifer-matches,
Warren's blacking, digestive biscuits,
and Somebody's pills : he is doing well.
Gradually, imperceptibly, the Dalgetty type
faded away.  You no longer saw the captain's
name in the provisional committee list
of a bubble company.  He was superseded
by Professor Ravelin, Paracelsus Ravelin,
M.D., Condorcet Ravelin, F.R.S.  Count Von
Swindelheim bilked hotel-keepers instead
of the notorious Captain L—— .  Dalgetty
became a myth.  The thousand years of
peace seemed to have set in, and Gustavus
Adolphus was sold to the dogs'-meat
man.

The revolution of eighteen hundred and
forty-eight, attended as it was by prospects
of a general European convulsion, stirred up
some feeble sparks of the old Dalgetty
element ; but, they were sparse and soon
died out.  Some remnants of the erst noble
band of captains hurried over from the antipodes
to see if there were any hard knocks
going ; but the Unholy Alliance had the best
of it, and the Dalgetties sank to sleep again,
as Washington Irving tells us those ghostly
Indian chiefs do in the haunted glens about
Wolfert's Roost, who start from their slumbers
when they hear some distant band
carousing, echo back the shouts, and then fall
once more into their trance of centuries, with
their mouldering bows and arrows by their
sides.  There was nothing for Dugald Dalgetty
to do in 'forty-eight.  Mercenary as