'Morning breezes! here's a smash!' cried Rowley, pocketing his
flageolet in the middle of the Tight Little Island.
I was perhaps more conscious of the moral smash than the physical--
more alive to broken hearts than to broken chaises; for, as plain
as the sun at morning, there was a screw loose in this runaway
match. It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh:
their taste in humour is both poor and sinister; and for a man,
running the posts with four horses, presumably with open pockets,
and in the company of the most entrancing little creature
conceivable, to have come down so far as to be laughed at by his
own postillions, was only to be explained on the double hypothesis,
that he was a fool and no gentleman.
I have said they were man and woman. I should have said man and
child. She was certainly not more than seventeen, pretty as an
angel, just plump enough to damn a saint, and dressed in various
shades of blue, from her stockings to her saucy cap, in a kind of
taking gamut, the top note of which she flung me in a beam from her
too appreciative eye. There was no doubt about the case: I saw it
all. From a boarding-school, a black-board, a piano, and
Clementi's Sonatinas, the child had made a rash adventure upon life
in the company of a half-bred hawbuck; and she was already not only
regretting it, but expressing her regret with point and pungency.
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