So he retired again to the rocking-chair, about ten years older than when he rose from it.

For he had grown from a boy into a man.
He had fallen over head and ears in love, and all in five minutes, fallen deeply, seriously in love, to the exclusion of all other sublunary matters, before he had well had time to notice whether she spoke with an Irish brogue or a Scotch (happily she did neither).
Sudden, you say: well, yes; but in lat.

34 degrees, and lower, whether in the southern or northern hemisphere, these sort of affairs come on with a rapidity and violence only equalled by the thunder-storms of those regions, and utterly surprising to you who perhaps read this book in 52 degrees north, or perhaps higher.

I once went to a ball with as free and easy, heart-whole a young fellow as any I know, and agreed with him to stay half an hour, and then come away and play pool.

In twenty-five minutes by my watch, which keeps time like a ship's chronometer, that man was in the tragic or cut-throat stage of the passion with a pretty little thing of forty, a cattledealer's widow, who stopped HIS pool-playing for a time, until she married the great ironmonger in George Street.