At length he posted off to the fourth and last corner, and read and read as before. There was one Mr. Parchment's name so dusky, and faded, and begrimed, as to be with the greatest difficulty deciphered; its very illegibility suggested a veteran in the profession, who in his day had done the state some service by issuing many a fieri facias, and breaking many a moral delinquent on the wheel of his own wrong-doings, or, perchance, misfortunes. Some there were which shone gloomily forth in the bright relief of recent execution, being typical of the yet clean and undarkened consciences of those whose names they bore. There were other names, too, and of intermediate hues, and of course in following up the metaphor, which represented the different degrees of standing and different degrees of conscience-darkening which time and circumstances had effected. After having run over these strata of addresses after having muttered Mr. Fleecem, Mr. Clutcher, Messrs. Skinner and Shark, and others, his delighted eye caught the patronymic of Mr. Gideon Clincher! He

paused a moment, and then respired more freely.

Those whose curiosity has led them to explore caves and catacombs, and, Cyclopslike, grope about such places, may perhaps be enabled to conceive something of Godfrey's present emotions. The old simile of the fly and the spider forced itself upon the fancybut to ascend and enter he was compelledthere was no alternative. Three flights of stone steps brought the visitor to the story of Mr. Clincher's chambers, and it was very provoking when he read a slip of paper wafered on the door, announcing to all clients and comers, that Mr. Clincher would be in at four o'clock. Godfrey drew out his watch and saw it was only half-past two-he halted a moment-lowered the said watch into his drab smalls, wistfully deliberated, and then descended, muttering that he supposed he should be obliged to come again.

In order the interim might not pass tardily, he wandered into Fleet Street, moralized on the passing crowds, gazed into the shop win

dows, and finally entered the coffee-room of a neighbouring hotel for the purpose of renovating the corporeal man with a sandwich and half-a-pint of mulled sherry. He threw his eyes over a morning paper, and perused the leader on the very probable event of a coming and mighty campaign on the ContiSome strangers were seated at the same table, and with much force of argument pro and con, discoursing the then aspect of politics. They unanimously agreed on one point-that a desperate battle would ere long be fought, and that there would be hot work for those whose profession was fighting.

nent.

Godfrey was interested, he set his ears, and cogitated upon the reasonings of these amateur politicians. There were several other persons in the coffee-room, and everybody seemed at home and at his ease but himself-he, Godfrey De Bohun, the lord of Elleringay Manor, and in whose veins the blood of the Plantagenets circled! If he had been seated on a broken column in Edom, a lonely contemplator in the primeval forests of Connecticut, or if he had been

dropped at Tobolsk, or Timbuctoo, he could not have felt more solitary. He always did say the Londoners were an unsocial set, and though he was the squire of a large domain, nominally in commission of the peace, and a very potent supporter of a county member, yet no one took the slightest notice of himhe always had hated London, and he always would! He was a little magnate when he visited his own county town-he was here a nobody, had very disagreeably sunk into neglect and nothingness. At and in the vicinage of Elleringay, no one would have disrespectfully passed him without recognition, or some demonstration of attention, but he now was taken no more notice of than if his bodily presence formed no entity in the Fleet Street coffee-house. He munched his biscuit, sipped his mulled sherry, and again declared between his teeth that he hated London!

His imperious temper, and a long life spent in an obscure country district, unduly exacted attention, and conferred a narrowness of mind as much to be pitied as despised. He was not alone in his aversion to the capital; it was

the prejudice of his class. He felt the utter impossibility of any prominence in so vast a city. From whence he came, a few patrimonial acres, or a moderate income, made the possessor a sort of little Croesus; in London, dukes and millionaires ever felt themselves humanity, and jostled through the crowds as mere bipeds.

Scarcely had the drowsy chime of a neighbouring clock-tower, which reminded the living streams at its base of the flight of hours, ceased tinkling four, when Godfrey's hand grasped the huge iron latch of his solicitor's eyrie in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Mr. Gideon Clincher had returned, and this was manifest by the removal of the previously mentioned slip of paper. Gideon was a person remarkably punctual in all his diurnal arrangements, and there was so much of the business man blended with the professional, that had he commenced life as a greengrocer, or vended bobbin and twist, he would have accumulated. His carefulness, and methodic habits, and unwearied industry would, under any circumstances, have paved the way