young

never. In my absence Mr. Bopps, our head-cashier,—a gentleman in whose religious and business principles I have the very highest confidence, --in my absence Mr. Bopps officiates. They are all most carefully tended and watched over. I demand in turn from them punctuality and regularity, and thoroughly moral conduct. Our porter M'Laughlin, a most trustworthy man, with his wife, an excellent Christian woman if there ever was one, attend to the household duties. We require every gentleman to be in-doors and a-bed by eleven o'clock. Early habits cannot be too soon inculcated. Late hours are unfitting the men of the present day only too sadly for the occupations of life. No. Our salary, to commence with, is not large; but then these equivalent advantages must be regarded. We give nothing the first three years, except perhaps a present of a sovereign or two at Christmas, by way of encouragement, and a handsomely bound Church-Service. After that the salary will be, say, eighty pounds a year, when the clerk will cease to reside in our house; though it is to be hoped, and indeed I pray that it may be so, that he will have by that time acquired a lesson of moral conduct that he will not readily forget. I should mention that we steadily set our faces against improvident and impoverishing marriages. We allow no clerk to be married who is in receipt of less than an income of three hundred pounds per annum."

So Munker drawled on, in a sort of unmusical chanting or intonation, the heavy lids drooping over his eyes, wringing his large white hands, and twisting his long fingers together, as he was in the habit of doing while speaking.

Latherstone had been nearly three years a resident in the house in Great Boodle Street.

"I know I am getting to be a beastly hypocrite, stopping at Hunker's," Latherstone would say sometimes, with his native frankness. "Do I whine when I talk, or show the whites of my eyes too much? Do I look very much like a sneak? Tell us, there's a good fellow, if I do. How jolly you must be living here independent in these snug lodgings!"

I did not like to tell him that a half-bottle of whiskey (Irish) had disappeared since the morning, and that I had only that day paid away another eighteenpence for a week's sock-mending. I could not choose that moment to tell him that the coal-dust blew in dreadfully at my bedroomwindow, seriously affecting my hair-brushes, and that the noise the cats made on the roof at night was simply agonising, to say nothing of the drum of the Punch-and-Judy man all day. And he to call them snug lodgings! Ha! ha!

"There was such a row at our place to-day," Latherstone runs on, "and Dickson got the sack. I'm so sorry, because he's a good little fellow, is Dickson. He would smoke in his bedroom, you know, and of course they couldn't stand that; and so up comes M'Laughlin, and orders him to leave off directly. And then Dickson asked M'Laughlin who he thinks he is when he is at home, and whether he'll take a cheroot. I do

think Dickey was a little on, you know, between ourselves. Then M'Laughlin brings up Bopps, and Dickey offers to fight him then and there. So of course this morning Munker says to him severely,

"You can pack up your things, Mr. Dickson, and you needn't trouble yourself to come here any more.'

"Thank you, sir,' says Dickey, quite coolly; 'just what I was thinking of doing myself.'

"Abandoned creature!' cries Munker, no end of shocked, you know; 'what do you think your widowed mother would say of your conduct?'

"Never you mind,' answers Dickey; 'and just you let my widowed mother alone, will you, or I'll let you know the reason why, though I am a little one.'

"And off he goes in a cab, as bold as brass, after he'd been round, smoking such a big cigar all the while, to shake hands with us all in the big office. Wasn't Bopps in a rage!"

Latherstone was full of information about Hunker's bank. "What do you think, old fellow?" he said another day. "Isn't it a shame? They've dismissed old Simpson-Simmy, we always call him. Why, he's nearly sixty, and been in the bank I don't know how many years. Such a good old sort! And they never gave him more than a hundred and fifty. And he's got several nieces and nephews-his sister's children-entirely dependent on him; and so he was trying to earn a little more money by teaching writing and arithmetic in the evening, after business hours. Well, Munker hears of this. You can't do both,' he says to him sharply; 'you can't attend to duties here and there too. It's a fraud upon the firm to attempt it. I can't submit to be robbed like this. You ought to be ashamed of such grasping, selfish conduct, you ought. We must part, Mr. Simpson;' and the poor old man has to go. I say, it's getting on for eleven, isn't it? By George, I must be off, or I shall never hear the last of it from M'Laughlin."

It will be seen that Latherstone and myself were on terms of considerable intimacy; and there was quite a reciprocity of confidence. Of course, he knew all my grievances at Swinfen, Sawyer, and Co.'s. Of course, he knew-he was the first to know-of my hopeless passion-of all that dreadful business, in short, in connection with her. I am not relating that story. Not now may I tell of the cruelties of a flinty-hearted parent, a wretched victim standing at the altar in her orange-blossoms, but not with me,-the injured lover with the lacerated bosom,-let me break off! He knew of this, and sympathised with my sorrows; wept with me over them, giving me such comfort as he could, like the good true friend he was. And of course I knew in turn-and how I envied him his happiness!-of his love for Bessy Jeffs (her father a most respectable medical man, M.R.C.S., 137 Judd Place East, New Road); knew, too, that that love was returned. Happy Latherstone, whose course of true love ran so smoothly! While I, what had I done that I-but this is weakness-folly!

Bessy Jeffs was very pretty. Such a slim, supple, graceful figure! such a delicately small waist-naturally small; not brought so by compression, and nipping, and tight stays, and like horrors. And such large liquid round brown eyes, and such long sheltering black lashes! I remember that it was very comforting in the midst of all my troubles to receive the sweet sympathy that beamed from Bessy Jeffs's brown eyes, and which she poured like a healing balsam into my wounds. How tenderly she consoled me! how full of gentleness, and kindness, and goodness she was for me! how angrily she declared that Matilda was cold, cruel, false, and unworthy of me, and so on! And how fond she was of Tom Latherstone! and how fond Tom was of her! Ah, those were happy times, when Tom Latherstone was in love with Bessy Jeffs, and I was nursing my broken heart. Shall I ever forget those pleasant evening walks in St. James's Park, when the offices of Messrs. Hunker, Munker, and Co., and of Messrs. Swinfen, Sawyer, and Co., were closed for the day, and their clerks had some hours of liberty before them; especially that one evening, a very hot evening, when we sat on a bench-Bessy, and Tom, and I—on the margin of the ornamental water, and ate two pounds of white-heart cherries, procured at, and conveyed from, Covent Garden Market expressly to be enjoyed on that spot (because there it was that Tom had made his offer a year ago and been accepted), and watched the waterfowl, and simmered in the sunset rays, and were all three such firm and steadfast friends? You see, I was not such a very bad third party for Tom and Bessy, for I had continual relapses into contemplative melancholy, when I was quite lost to the outer world,-which must have been convenient and opportune for the lovers, I dare say, but perhaps I was thinking more about myself than about them just then. O Matilda! -But this must not be.

"Another two months," remarked Tom, "and I shall leave Great Boodle Street. No more getting home, then, before eleven o'clock for fear of M'Laughlin. I'll never go to bed before one, you see if I do; what a treat that will be! Oh, yes; I shall still be in Hunker's bank, only I shall be able to live where I like; then I shall have come in for my eighty pounds a year. I shall be one of Hunker's non-resident clerks, as they call them."

I remember that it was very shortly after this that, one evening, Latherstone rushed precipitately into my apartments. It was about nine o'clock, I know, because I remember that I was just considering whether I could or not afford to go half-price to a neighbouring popular theatre. "Good gracious, Tom," I cried, "what's the matter? How white your face is! Why, you're quite out of breath. Have something, do; you'd better, you know."

"Don't!" He spoke in an agitated voice, shaking his head negatively. "Oh, my dear fellow, something so dreadful has happened." "What! pray, tell me; this suspense is agony."

"Judd Place East-three o'clock this afternoon," he gasped out.

"Apoplectic seizure. Poor old Jeffs-lived two hours, but never spoke again; dead-quite dead. Such a good kind old man, and that darling Bessy crying fit to break her little heart, and mine too."

The sad news was only too true. Poor Bessy Jeffs was left an orphan. A great gloom clouded our lives; for a time our old happiness seemed to have drifted away from us quite out of sight. And then fresh trouble came, or rather the discovery of more trouble. Old Jeffs was insolvent. Worse-he had died very much in debt, and the little property left at his death, consisting chiefly of the furniture at his house in Judd Place East, was in danger of being seized by his creditors.

"Isn't it dreadful!" said Latherstone. "Not a halfpenny left for Bessy. Poor darling, totally unprovided for."

"What is she going to do?"

"It's horrid, it is. She talks of going out as a governess-a nursery governess, a girl like that, who can play the piano and do wool-work as she can, or a Sunday-school teacher. Fancy my Bessy teaching at a Sunday-school, and getting her living by it." And poor Tom stamped on the floor in his rage, and the tears came into his eyes.

"You'll never allow that, Tom." I hardly knew what I was saying; but he caught at my words.

"No, of course not. I see what you mean. You agree with me. Oh, thank you, for your good advice. You are indeed a friend. Of course I shall not allow it. I will follow your counsel. I will marry her at once. With Bessy as my wife, the world may do its worst."

"But Munker"-I began. He interrupted, with a strong observation in regard to Munker, continuing, "if Munker finds me out, I get the sack, that's all. He allows no clerk to be married with less than 300l. a year." "And you've only 801.?”

"And not that yet. Can two people live on 801. a year?”

"No," I answered. I thought it best to be plain-spoken on the subject. I did not want it to be said that I had urged them on to an act of folly, however romantic.

"Very well," said Tom, quite calmly,-"we can't live on it; so we'll die on it. Bessy, I am sure, will think as I do. Better to starve happily together than live miserably separate." What more could be said? Their marriage was decided upon, and I had the credit of advising it. But we all agreed that every precaution should be taken to keep the affair as secret as possible; for discovery would lead to Tom's dismissal from Hunker's, and what would become of the young couple then?

It was arranged that the marriage should take place immediately, and, with the view, in some way which I don't now see precisely, of averting suspicion, before the time came for Tom's removal from Great Boodle Street into apartments of his own. Bessy, since her father's death, had been residing at an acidulated great-aunt's in Burton Crescent; but she was only to remain there until, as her aunt thought, a situation as gover

ness could be procured for her, or until, as we planned, Tom could remove her as his wife to some moderate lodgings in a then unfinished and desolate portion of Pimlico. There she was to be secluded in a maze of building materials, like a modern fair Rosamond. The ceremony was to be performed at a large parish-church in the neighbourhood of Judd Place and Burton Crescent. As a matter of economy, was agreed upon as preferable that the marriage should be by banns.

it

"You see," said Tom, "it's such a large parish, and there's always so many marriages going on, and so many banns to publish, that the curates gabble them off on Sundays as quick as lightning. It seems the most public, but it's really the most private way of getting married possible; for every body's busy waking up after the lessons and finding their places for the next part of the service, and no one listens to the names, and the curates take care that they shan't make them out much if they do listen."

Perhaps, however, the real reason for adopting this course was, that it was the cheapest.

I was to be one of the witnesses. The other (there was only one other person in the secret) was a Miss Laggers, a schoolfellow of Bessy's, -a plain, devoted, rather stupid, but intensely romantic young lady, who enjoyed the whole business immensely. "Why, it's as good as a novel, every bit," she said; and it seemed that from her point of view she could not have awarded higher praise. So she bought a new pink bonnet and grass-green gloves. 'As it's a clandestine union," she whispered to me in the vestry, "I thought it better not to wear white-it's so conspicuous;" and she was prepared to burst into a flood of tears, or scream for assistance, or stand before the altar with a pistol at full-cock to prevent the interruption of the ceremony, or in fine to be equal to any crisis that could possibly occur.

But there was a sudden hitch. The night before the wedding Tom came to me looking very dismal indeed.

"Here's a go," he said. "What's to be done now? I can't get a holiday for to-morrow. Bopps refused me point blank-the beast. 'No,' he says, 'certainly not; couldn't think of such a thing. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Latherstone, I don't like your goings-on at all. You'd better be careful. I advise you, as a friend,'—and he frowned at me like a bear. What did he mean? Has he discovered any thing, do you think? Does he suspect?"

We had a grave discussion upon this. Postponement was very dangerous; and to what date was the marriage to be postponed? When was Tom certain of obtaining a holiday? Who could say? Bopps couldn't have found out any thing, we decided. Not a soul at Hunker's knew of our plan, or could have dreamt of Tom's approaching change of condition. At last we decided that no alteration should be made.

"I shall have the City bills to take out to-morrow," said Tom. "I must start as early as possible. You must be at the church with darling