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"Recollect, my dear," said his mamma, "that you are a Tuggeridge by birth, and that I expect you to beat all the boys in the school; especially that Wellington MacTurk, who, though he is a lord's son, is nothing to you, who are the heir of Tuggeridgeville."
"What's a tournament?" says Tug, and so said his mamma when she heard the news; and when she knew what a tournament was, I think, really, she WAS as angry as MacTurk said she would be, and gave us no peace for days together. "What!" says she, "dress up in armor, like play-actors, and run at each other with spears? The Kilblazes must be mad!"
Next door to us, in Portland Place, lived the Right Honorable the Earl of Kilblazes, of Kilmacrasy Castle, County Kildare, and his mother the Dowager Countess. Lady Kilblazes had a daughter, Lady Juliana Matilda MacTurk, of the exact age of our dear Jemimarann; and a son, the Honorable Arthur Wellington Anglesea Blucher Bulow MacTurk, only ten months older than our boy Tug.
Although there was a regular cut between the next-door people and us, yet Tug and the Honorable Master MacTurk kept up their acquaintance over the back-garden wall, and in the stables, where they were fighting, making friends, and playing tricks from morning to night, during the holidays.
But she declined to accept a present for doing her duty, and expressed lively sympathy for the poor young lady who was lost. In a few days a diamond-studded watch and chain arrived for Miss MacTurk. Merton himself wired to Logan, imploring him, in the name of friendship, to abandon all engagements, and come to Inchnadampf.
So, like Thackeray, as a child I sympathised with Lord MacTurk who wished to cut off the heads of his brethren. Now I have survived them all, and I fondly regret the sounds of voices that are still.
Neither the Highland cicerone Macturk nor the demure washingwoman, were drawn from imagination; and on re-reading my tale, after the lapse of a few years, and comparing its effect with my remembrance of my worthy friend's oral narration, which was certainly extremely affecting, I cannot but suspect myself of having marred its simplicity by some of those interpolations, which, at the time when I penned them, no doubt passed with myself for embellishments.
Since his death it has been discovered that all his property was heavily mortgaged to old MacTurk, the worst man in the whole of Savannah; and he has taken possession of the place, and thrown her and the children into the slave-pen, from which they will be sold to the highest bidder at a sheriff's sale. Who can say that a similar fate may never be mine?
Master Arthur MacTurk was at the famous school of the Reverend Clement Coddler, along with a hundred and ten other young fashionables, from the age of three to fifteen; and to this establishment Jemmy sent our Tug, adding forty guineas to the hundred and twenty paid every year for the boarders.
Fancy our horror when, on the crowd making way, we saw Tug pummelling away at the Honorable Master MacTurk!
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