Sawbone, would have
neither mother nor daughter; there was no help for it, Julia and her
mother must have a house together, and Jowler knew that his wife would
fill it with her odious blackamoor friends.
I could not, however, go forth satisfied to the campaign until I learned
from Julia my fate. I watched twenty opportunities to see her alone,
and wandered about the Colonel's bungalow as an informer does about a
public-house, marking the incomings and the outgoings of the family, and
longing to seize the moment when Miss Jowler, unbiassed by her mother or
her papa, might listen, perhaps, to my eloquence, and melt at the tale
of my love.
But it would not do--old Jowler seemed to have taken all of a sudden to
such a fit of domesticity, that there was no finding him out of doors,
and his rhubarb-colored wife (I believe that her skin gave the
first idea of our regimental breeches), who before had been gadding
ceaselessly abroad, and poking her broad nose into every menage in the
cantonment, stopped faithfully at home with her spouse. My only chance
was to beard the old couple in their den, and ask them at once for their
cub.
So I called one day at tiffin:--old Jowler was always happy to have my
company at this meal; it amused him, he said, to see me drink Hodgson's
pale ale (I drank two hundred and thirty-four dozen the first year I was
in Bengal)--and it was no small piece of fun, certainly, to see old Mrs.
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