CHAPTER IX.

Joseph's increasing embarrassments-Changes his lodgings— An adventure with a bailiff in his new lodgings.

EVER since his connexion with the morning journal to which repeated reference has been made, Joseph had been living up to his means, and very often considerably above them. No one will be surprised at the result: he had been gradually getting into debt, and his debts had latterly become very troublesome to him, because his creditors had become very clamourous. Everyone who has studied the philosophy of debt, and especially those who have done so practically, must have been struck with the fact, that after one's pecuniary obligations have existed for a certain length of time, they not

only subject the party to all the annoyance of being doggedly dunned for payment; but they begin, by means of the expenses incurred in law proceedings instituted for their recovery, to increase in amount with an appalling rapidity. And if the practice of not paying one's debts until compelled by law, is allowed to go on for any length of time, the result will be the impossibility of paying at all. No man ever yet continued for many years to act on the principle of not paying his just debts until forced to do so by the resistless compulsion of the law, without in the end becoming the victim of his own imprudence and his own want of honesty. Joseph was now in a fair way of being placed in this unpleasant pecuniary predicament. For a season, and a very long season too, he had managed by plausible promises to put off his creditors from time to time. He found, however, that obtaining their consent to a little longer time, was not synonymous with cancelling the obligations under which he lay to them. He,

moreover, made the discovery, that just as the stream is stemmed for a time only to rush onwards with greater force and rapidity when the obstruction is removed, or has been broken through, so the temporary silence of creditors is sure to be succeeded by a far greater clamour than that which had been previously raised when demanding payment of the money due. Joseph now found himself in this situation. He had put off his creditors till they would be put off no longer; and the remembrance of his oft-renewed and as often violated promises to pay, only served to make them more resolute in the determination to have their money by some means or other.

The result of this was, that he was driven about from one lodging to another like a hunted hare. Bailiffs were constantly in quest of him; and whenever he had reason to believe that his place of abode was discovered, there was no alternative but either to pay the debts for which he was most hotly pursued, or to seek a

further respite from the persecution of bailiffs, by repairing to some new obscure lodgings.

To have a pack of clamorous creditors constantly dogging one's steps, and ready like so many beasts of prey to pounce upon their victim the moment they can get him into their clutches, is a very uncomfortable condition to be in. So soliloquized Joseph; and he was doubtless right. To be incessantly hunted by hungry creditors, resolved not on any account to relinquish their pursuit until they shall either get their money, or infix their talons in the person of their creditor; to be in this situation, must be one of the most miserable situations in which a human being can be placed. But then, Joseph found it convenient to forget and persons in his situation usually contrive to forget-that he was the aggressor; that he first injured his creditors by getting into their debt, without ever bestowing a moment's consideration as to whether or not there was any reasonable prospect of his ever being

able to discharge the obligations which he came under to them.

With the view of keeping as much as possible out of the reach of his creditors, who were now pursuing him more hotly than ever, Joseph resolved on taking lodgings in the second floor of a miserable-looking house in the neighbourhood of Clare Market; a place which he thought likely to be among the last suspected, inasmuch as both the house and the locality somewhat decidedly contrasted with his appearance and manners. The landlady was a short, stout, bustling middle-aged Irishwoman, named Phiddy O'Callaghan, who had not been many years in the metropolis, and who had for a still shorter period sought to earn a livelihood by letting furnished lodgings. She had only, indeed, sustained the latter character twelve months, commencing precisely three months after the death of her husband, who, according to her own account, was one of the greatest "jewels of a man that ever ould Ireland sent across the