The bowl and the glasses filled, by some little management on Power's part our friend the cornet would be _drawn out_, as the phrase is, into some confession of his early years, which seemed to have been exclusively spent in love-making,--devotion to the fair being as integral a portion of his character as tippling was of the worthy major's.
Like most men who pass their lives in over-studious efforts to please,--however ungallant the confession be,--the amiable Sparks had had little success.

His love, if not, as it generally happened, totally unrequited, was invariably the source of some awkward catastrophe, there being no imaginable error he had not at some time or other fallen into, nor any conceivable mischance to which he had not been exposed.

Inconsolable widows, attached wives, fond mothers, newly-married brides, engaged young ladies were by some _contretemps_ continually the subject of his attachments; and the least mishap which followed the avowal of his passion was to be heartily laughed at and obliged to leave the neighborhood.
Duels, apologies, actions at law, compensations, etc., were of every-day occurrence, and to such an extent, too, that any man blessed with a smaller bump upon the occiput would eventually have long since abandoned the pursuit, and taken to some less expensive pleasure.

But poor Sparks, in the true spirit of a martyr, only gloried the more, the more he suffered; and like the worthy man who continued to purchase tickets in the lottery for thirty years, with nothing but a succession of blanks, he ever imagined that Fortune was only trying his patience, and had some cool forty thousand pounds of happiness waiting his perseverance in the end.

Whether this prize ever did turn up in the course of years, I am unable to say; but certainly, up to the period of his history I now speak of, all had been as gloomy and unrequiting as need be.