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A SHABBY GENTEEL STORY 67
CHAPTER VII
WHICH BRINGS A GREAT NUMBER OF PEOPLE TO
MARGATE BY THE STEAMBOAT
THE events which this history records began in the month
of February. Time had now passed, and April had arrived,
and with it that festive season so loved by schoolboys, and
called the Easter holidays. Not only schoolboys, but men, profit
by this period of leisure,—such men, especially, as have just come
into enjoyment of their own cups and saucers, and are in daily
expectation of their whiskers—college men, I mean,—who are
persons more anxious than any others to designate themselves and
each other by the manly title.
Among other men, then, my Lord Viscount Cinqbars, of Christ
Church, Oxon, received a sum of money to pay his quarter's bill,
and having written to his papa that he was busily engaged in
reading for the " little-go," and must, therefore, decline the delight
he had promised himself of passing the vacation at Cinqbars Hall,
—and having, the day after his letter was despatched, driven to
town tandem with young Tom Tufthunt, of the same university,—
and having exhausted the pleasures of the metropolis—the theatres,
the Cider Cellars, the Finish, the station-houses, and other places
which need by no means be here particularised,—Lord Cinqbars,
I say, growing tired of London at the end of ten days, quitted the
metropolis somewhat suddenly : nor did he pay his hotel bill at
Long's before his departure ; but he left that document in possession
of the landlord, as a token of his (my Lord Cinqbars') confidence
in his host.
Tom Tufthunt went with my Lord, of course (although of an
aristocratic turn in politics, Tom loved and respected a lord as much
as any democrat in England). And whither do you think this
worthy pair of young gentlemen were bound ? To no less a place
than Margate ; for Cinqbars was filled with a longing to go and see
his old friend Brandon, and determined, to use his own elegant
words, " to knock the old buck up."
There was no adventure of consequence on board the steamer
which brought Lord Cinqbars and his friend from London to