General Bounce; Or, The Lady and the Locusts. G. J. Whyte-Melville

Where the rose blushes in the garden, there will the bee and the butterfly be found, humming and fluttering around. So is it in the world; the fair girl, whose sweetness is enhanced by the fictitious advantages of wealth and position, will ever have lovers and admirers enough and to spare.

Burns was no bad judge of human nature; and he has a stanza on this subject, combining the reflection of the philosopher with the canny discrimination of the Scot.

“Away with your follies of beauty’s alarms,

The slender bit beauty you clasp in your arms;

But gi’e me the lass that has acres of charms,

Oh, gi’e me the lass with the weel-plenished farms.”

Should the following pages afford such attractive young ladies matter for a few moments’ reflection, the author will not have written in vain.

May he hope they will choose well and wisely; and that the withered rose, when she has lost her fragrance, may be fondly prized and gently tended by the hand that plucked her in her dewy morning prime.

GENERAL BOUNCE

OR, THE LADY AND THE LOCUSTS

CHAPTER I
MY COUSIN

Table of Contents

AN ENGLISHMAN’S HOLIDAY—ST. SWITHIN’S IN A CALM—THE MERCHANT’S AMBITION—“MON BEAU COUSIN”—CASTLES IN THE AIR—A LIVELY CRAFT—“HAIRBLOWER” AND HIS COLD BATH

Much as we think of ourselves, and with all our boasted civilisation, we Anglo-Saxons are but a half-barbarian race after all. Nomadic, decidedly nomadic in our tastes, feelings, and pursuits, it is but the moisture of our climate that keeps us in our own houses at all, and like our Scandinavian ancestors (for in turf parlance we have several crosses of the old Norse blood in our veins), we delight periodically—that is, whenever we have a fortnight’s dry weather—to migrate from our dwellings, and peopling the whole of our own sea-board, push our invading hordes over the greater part of Europe, nor refrain from thrusting our outposts even into the heart of Asia, till the astonished Mussulman, aghast at our vagaries, strokes his placid beard, and with a blessing on his Prophet that he is not as we are, soothes his disgust with a sentiment, so often repeated that in the East it has become a proverb—viz. that “There is one devil, and there are many devils; but there is no devil like a Frank in a round hat!”

It was but last autumn that, stepping painfully into our tailor’s shop—for, alas! a course of London dinners cannot be persisted in, season after season, without producing a decided tendency to gout in the extremities—hobbling, then, into our tailor’s warehouse, as he calls it, we were measured by an unfledged jackanapes, whose voice we had previously heard warning his brother fractions that “an old gent was a waitin’ inside,” instead of that spruce foreman who, for more

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