had induced her to throw herself away on an entire stranger whom she had never seen before, her answer was, "I refused him the whole of the first day; had I done so the second he would have been in a fever."

Amy was really very funny, however spitefully disposed towards me. To be brief with her history. Trench put her to school again, from motives of virtue and economy. From that school she eloped with General Maddan.

Amy's virtue was something like the nine lives of a cat.

With General Maddan she, for several years, professed constancy; indeed I am not quite certain that she was otherwise. I never in my occasional visits saw anything suspicious except once, a pair of breeches!

It was one day when I went to call on her with my brother. General Maddan was not in town. She wanted to go to the Opera. The fit had only just seized her, at past nine o'clock. She begged me to make her brother's excuse at home as, she said, he must accompany her.

"What, in those dirty boots?" I asked.

"I have got both dress-stockings and breeches upstairs, of Maddan's," replied Amy; and I assisted at the boy's toilette.

In handing him the black pair of breeches, which Amy had presented me with, I saw marked, in Indian ink, what, being in the inside, had probably escaped her attention. It was simply the name of Proby.

"How came Lord Proby's black small-clothes here?" said I.

Amy snatched them out of my hand in a fury; and desired me to go out of the house. Au reste, she had often, at that time, three hundred pounds in her pocket at once, and poor Maddan had not a shilling. All this happened before I had left my home.

At the period I now write about I believe that Maddan was abroad, and Amy lived in York Place, where she used to give gay evening parties to half the fashionable men in town, after the Opera. She never came to me but from interested motives. Sometimes she forced herself into my private box, or teased me to make her known to the Duke of Argyle.

This year we three graces, as we were called, hired an opera box for the season together. Amy had another, near us, for herself and her host of beaux. Her suppers on Saturday nights were very gay. Julia and Fanny were always invited; but she was puzzled what to do with me. If I was present, at least half the men were on my side of the room; if I stayed away, so did all those who went only on my account.

This difficulty became a real privation to such men as delighted in us both together. Among these was Luttrell; everybody knows Luttrell; or if they do not, I will tell them more about him by-and-by. Luttrell, I say, undertook to draw up a little agreement, stating that, since public parties ought not to suffer from private differences, we were thereby requested to engage ourselves to bow to each other in all societies, going through the forms of good breeding even with more ceremony than if we had liked each other, on pain of being voted public nuisances, and private enemies to all wit and humour.

Signed with our hands and seals....

"Now," said Fanny one day to Julia, soon after our first opera season had begun, "Harriette and I propose cutting you Mrs. Julia altogether, if you do not, this very evening, give us a full and true account of yourself, from the day you were born and the date thereof up to this hour."