THE MOFUSSIL.

CHAPTER THE SECOND.

Quando ullum inveniemus parem?

HORACE.

THE very afternoon of the day I have just described saw me in close confab, in cantonments, with my new acquaintance, Mr. Aylmour. We had an uncommonly long walk up and down the Verandah of his little. Bungalow; and before we parted, I learned all that my young lover had to communicate of himself, his affection, his hopes, and his future prospects. Of hope; he had abundance, for after his beloved Maria's avowal of this morning; what had he more to think of, or desire? But, as for the future, true, he would not subject one so

dear to him to the annoyances of marching about with the regiment, amidst the luxuries only of his present means. But had he not received a most favourable reply, only a few days since, to an application for the Quarter-master General's department? did not the Military Secretary to his Lordship announce to him, that "his name was upon the list of candidates ?" After one or two close enquiries, I found that Mr. Aylmour had lately transmitted a recommendatory letter to the Governor-General, from gentleman of considerable property of Leicestershire, a county neighbour, and late brother-sportsman of his Lordship; but although the Lieutenant had no one earthly reason that I could establish, for his present over-sanguine expectations of success, he seemed, like all young aspirants, as certain of his wishes, as if in actual possession of a promise under the Marquess's own hand and seal,

I well knew that his only chance with

Mrs. Alport, in the present desperate state of his love affair, would be his success with a staff appointment. Not that Mamma was altogether as worldly-minded as might be concluded from this. In truth, she was a plain, good-hearted, unaffected every day sort of body who made Alport a most excellent wife; though we were all assuredly in wonder, in our day, what miracle, or combination of fates, could have brought them together! He, in his season of wooing, a wild, betting, ne'er-do-weel of a Sportsman; and she, a simple, quiet, pretty-enough daughter of a neighbouring Indigo Planter. But like most Mammas of a few years' standing in India, she had, by this time, acquired a delicate and very discriminative judgment as to the eligibility, or otherwise, of her daughter's admirers. The difference of the services; the nice point of relative situation; the distinctions of staff and salary, and the comparative advantages flowing from the snug fixture of permanent appointment,

opposed to the luckless inconveniencies of a scanty marching establishment; all these were as well understood by her, and as much a portion of her maternal belief, and hopes for her daughter's earthly happiness, as the very creed itself was, to her sense of religion, a necessary foundation for her future and everlasting welfare.

Under all these circumstances, I suddenly remembered me of pressing business, at the Presidency; and wrote forthwith to the Deputy Post-Master, for an early dâk. I soon found that I should have the benefit of company this time; for Mr. Neilman, described as a most hearty good fellow, an Indigo planter, had ridden over to my friend Alport's from his factory, having ordered his dâk for Calcutta on the same evening as myself. We soon found ourselves perfectly good friends; and on our way together, before we had proceeded half a dozen stages, were as mutually communicative

VOL. I.

R

as two old kooe-hyes at home in a stagecoach, or two young Subalterns, in any part of the world, on a night picquet. He came out, he told me, some fifteen years before, as a midshipman in the Honourable Company's Ship Sir William Curtis ; but not admiring his middy's berth on board, on reaching Bengal, he fairly ran for it? Having no friends at the Presidency, he must have had an edifying sort of retirement, at a punch house probably, for the first few weeks of his surreptitious introduction to India. At last, he made bold to write to his maternal uncle, an Indigo planter up the country, whose agents, by return of dâk, were desired to pack off the young gentleman in a small boat to the Leilpore factory. There it was that that young Neilman soon became an expert assistant, and after several years of hard fagging and galloping along the cultivation, he was enabled, by his uncle's retirement, and the aid of his agents,