These words were repeated about twice a-day-except on Mondays, when the washing was done, and my mother was too much put about to be hopeful.

But, there, the public does not want a Goldsmith's History or a Pinnock's Catechism of Mr. Thomas Gummer's early life; so I will bolt over the events as fast as a Derby horse can gallop, and come to the fortune.

After a spell at day school, I went as boarder to Tudor House, Epping. According to the prospectus, on which was engraved a flattering representation of the mansion and grounds, everything ever known-including classics, dancing, mathematics, music, bookkeeping, the use of the globes, and French by a native-was taught, besides liberal board, the comforts of a home, and high moral training, for thirty guineas a-year, a silver fork and spoon, six towels, and no extras except pew rent. That prospectus was a "do," and Tudor House ought to have been wound up in Chancery. After two years of hic, hæc, hoc, genitive hujus, I went into the "Delectus," and then to "Cæsar," and then back again to "Delectus." You see, the master could not teach us more than he knew, and even Cæsar floored him without a crib. The French was no better than the Latin, and the globes were of no use whatever. What good is it to teach a youth that the earth turns on a brass rod, and that the people on the other side of the world walk with their heads downwards, like flies on a ceiling? It may be science, but it is not sense.

On leaving school my father wanted me to go into the shop. My mother was furious. Her boy should not corn his fingers with lugging on his inferiors' boots and shoes! Her boy's talents were not going to be thrown away in a holland apron behind a counter! There was a two years' wrangle, during which time I had nothing to do but eat, sleep, and get into mischief. At last I entered the office of Messrs. Purrem and Mangles, solicitors, at a salary of five shillings a-week. My mother was delighted at my being in a genteel profession, and knew I should work my way to be Lord Chancellor. But I never had a chance of getting on. My mother did not understand that the best fish can't swim unless it is in the water; and that, no matter how clever a fish is, it can't put itself in the water. I was not even articled. Not that my mother grudged me money, but she would not pay the stamps.

"No," she exclaimed, "not a farthing shall go to a cheating Government for stamps. We are robbed enough in rates and taxes, and Tom will rise to the Great Seal and a gilt coach in spite of an imposing Government."

So I grubbed on at Purrem and Mangles until I was twenty-five, and my screw was three pounds a-week. I knew more of law than the fellows who pass the final. A solicitor will not help you to articles, particularly if you are worth your salt, because an unarticled clerk cannot set up for himself, and take away the clients. If I had been admitted, Purrem and Mangles would have sacked me. Not being articled, I was their confidential.

A lawyer's clerk, with three pounds a-week and perquisites, is well feathered, sees plenty of pleasure, and can do the swell. My career of mild dissipation was cut short by a visit to a theatre, where I saw Matilda Brace. It was a draft on my heart at sight, and was duly honoured. My courting was short, but fierce; and I never rested until I made Matilda Brace Mrs. Thomas Gummer. Political economy is against marrying and having a family, unless you have a fortune. But such eyes, such hair, such a mouth, such a waist, and such ways as Matilda had, were irresistible. Were you ever in a raffle? Bits of card-a very few marked -are shook up in a bag. Most likely you will draw a blank; but small chance of drawing even a second prize. The tickets seem all alike until you have drawn. That is matrimony. In courting time, one girl is as like another as peas in a pod. So sweet, so neat, so fond. No nagging, and no flustering. A very few turn out mortal angels; others are middling; but the most are the reverse of angels. I drew a first prize; and I defy any one to produce Mrs. Gummer's second-unless it is our girls. A fellow who could get a counterpart of my lease would be uncommonly lucky.

Matilda had a few pounds, and with the help of the old folks we furnished a small house at Bow. We began as we meant to go on. When we were doing our honeymoon-or rather, honey week-at Chigwell, Mrs. Gummer said

"Tom, my dear, I saw plenty of poverty at home before I went out to earn my living-and it's a caution. We must be a little saving, Tom. If we gobble up our eggs as fast as they are laid, and never think

of hatching fresh layers, some fine day we shall be as hungry as winter wolves, and have no eggs to eat. Keeping out of debt is better than getting into it; but putting by, Tom, is the best game."

Mr. Pitt was called a heaven-born minister. Perhaps he was, though he did load us with debt. But I am sure Matilda is a heavenborn economist. She is such a right-down genius, that I believe she would save a fortune out of nothing a-year, besides keeping her family tiptop.

"Our money, Tom, shan't line a landlord's pocket."

We let our first floor, and joined a building society; so that we were always rent free, and the house our own in fourteen years. Moreover, every week some of my salary, which increased yearly, went to the savings bank.

Mushrooms are slow growers compared to debts or savings. Owe a trifle, and before you know where you are the duns have you, body and soul. Save ever so little, and do it regularly, and you wake up and find yourself a person of property.

Moreover, we had windfalls. Being in the law, I have seen a great many wills; and I notice that when people are making their wills they generally think of one text of Scripture, and give most to those who have most. Mrs. Gummer's aunt, hearing we were not in want, left us £600. When my father's affairs were cleared up, there was over £1,000 to the good. Savings added, we had £4,000 invested; the house our own, and my screw crept up to £4 10s. a-week. That I call being well off, with only two domesticated daughters to keepNancy being twenty, and Janet eighteen.

It might be supposed that the Gummers were a contented family; and so we were, until the time my story begins.

It was Saturday night, and the girls had gone to bed half an hour earlier on account of the usual bath. Mrs. Gummer would think it a sin for young folks to go to bed on Saturday night without being lathered and rubbed from head to foot. I was over my first after-supper pipe and grog. Mrs. Gummer took a little gin and water-not that she cared for it, but hot suppers without a digester bring on spasms and night

mare.

"It is so much physic to me, Gummer." And the good soul sipped the gin and water as if she liked it.

Mrs. Gummer was doing something to one of the girls' dresses. Well, she is a tremendous woman with her needle. When a dress is soiled, it is turned inside out; when the plaits are worn, it is turned upside down, and the bottom trimmed; when the front breadths are shabby, they are taken out and the skirt is gored; and finally, the dress is converted into a petticoat. I have never had an entire new shirt since my marriage. The wristbands fray, and new ones are put on; the front goes, and a new one is put in; the body is worn, and as the wristbands and front are nearly equal to new, they are attached to a new body. Being better off makes no difference. Needling, to women, is what smoking is to men. Fellows who don't smoke are growlers, and women who don't sew are naggers. I cannot conceive domestic bliss with a sewing-machine.

The ghosts of great events always come first. I had a feeling that something was going to happen. For days there had been a mysterious nodding and whispering between mamma and the girls. I had received more than the ordinary attention. There had been potato cakes for tea, and favourite nick-nacks for supper. My grog was a trifle stronger than usual. There was abundance of clean pipes and pipe lights. Mrs. Gummer had not contradicted me for a week. I was in a manner ready for the onslaught, when Matilda put down her work, took a long sip at her anti-spasms physic, and coughed.

Gummer, there is a dead weight on my mind which I can't keep to myself." "Indeed, my dear!"

"For, Tom, a secret means mischief when people are the same flesh and bone, which we have been for over twenty years.'

"What on earth is the matter?" "There now, don't flare up; for it is very hard if a poor drudge of a wife is to be tongue-tied, and hollowed at fit to split every drum in her ear if she opens her mouth."

Another anti-spasms sip, and another cough.

"You see, Tom, if we are not Bank of England hot, leastways, we are comfortably warm. There is £200 a-year, equal to £4 a-week, from property, and which no one can touch. There is your four-ten from Purrem and Mangles. Moreover, the house is our own to live in or to let."

"To let, Matilda!"

Mrs. Gummer snatched up her work, and began to stitch fiercely. The needle clicked against the thimble with a sharp noise which might have been heard in the street.

"Gummer, I am disgusted with you. Are we trees that we cannot be moved, and must stick at Bow until we are carried out? Not that I dislike my native place, which is also yours and the girls. But it is not likings or dislikings that trouble me. Duty first and fancy second always has been and always will be the motto of Matilda Gummer, so long as she has a breath to draw and the strength to draw it."

in a year or two the girls would marry equal to their merits and what is coming to them. You know, if there were the most beautiful empresses at Bow that ever lived, and every hair of their heads hung with Koh-i-noor diamonds, gentility would no more think of marrying them, than they would think of putting on scarlet jackets and setting off with their gamekeepers to shoot London sparrows."

"I suppose you would like Belgravia?" said I, with a rise of my nose, for I was uncommonly vexed.

"Anywhere that pleases Thomas Gummer, Esquire, will please his poor, put-upon wife, provided, for the sake of the innocent girls, it is not East-end."

pair of paving stones."

"My dear, be a little reasonable. You have not told me what you want."

"Gummer, you are enough to turn a dove into an owl. I want to know if we are landlord's fixtures that must not be moved? And if we are not fixtures, is it or is it not our duty to give the poor dear girls their chance?"

"Matilda, I am not the one to grudge a month at the sea."

"Gummer, you would have driven Job into an asylum. Pray, what is the use of the sea to such girls as ours? For low flirting, and for picking up rogues and rascals, and empty-pursed monkeys, give me sands or piers; but for girls who have looks, education, and prospects, the sea is not worth the snuffings of a halfpenny tallow candle."

"Then where do you want to go for a trip?" said I, expecting to hear of a cheap excursion up the Rhine.

"We are not trippers, Gummer. I say, and I will say, that the girls ought to live in a genteel neighbourhood. The rent will be a pull; but the clothes and living can be pared down to make up for the loss."

"What! leave Bow for good? Leave where I have been born and bred! Matilda, I would rather not; and I don't think you could do it when it came to the going."

"Tom, for the sake of the girls I could go through an ocean of blazing brimstone. Suppose we take a villa in a high neighbourhood, standing in its own grounds, or at least semi-detached? Mark my words, Tom,

TABLE TALK.

S an additional note to the article on mushrooms which lately appeared in ONCE A WEEK, I append a few remarks on those curious freaks of nature commonly called "fairy rings." I dismiss the superstition-so pleasant to the more poetically inclined— which ascribes the formation of these rings to the Terpsichorean gambols of the fairies under the "pale moonlight," simply contenting myself, for the present, with the more matter-of-fact consideration as to how these curious circles are so suddenly and unaccountably formed. Every one who is accustomed to the country knows a "fairy ring" when he sees it. Each ring is only a belt of grass of a much darker green than that surrounding it. In a paper on "The Fairy Rings of Pastures," read by Professor Wray before the British Association, at Southampton, in 1846, it was stated that the grass of which such rings are formed is always the first to vegetate in the spring, and keeps the lead of the ordinary grass of the pastures till the period of cutting. If the grass of these "fairy rings" be examined in the spring and early summer, it will be found to conceal a number of agarics or "toadstools" of various sizes. They are found situated either entirely on the outside of the ring, or on the outer border of the grass which composes it. Decandolle's theory, that the rings increased by the excretions of these funguses being favourable for the growth of grass, but injurious to their own subsequent development on the same spot, was remarked on, and proved to be insufficient to explain the phenomena. A chemical examination was

READY-MONEY MORTIBOY.

A MATTER-OF-FACT STORY.

CHAPTER THE FOURTEENTH.

HREE weeks have passed since the suicide of Mr. Melliship and the failure of his bank. The town of Market Basing has in some measure recovered its tranquillity, and those who have lost money are beginning to consider that they are lucky in pulling something out of the wreck. Meantime, official assignees have taken possession of the offices, with all their papers. The bereaved and ruined family have stripped themselves of their last farthing, save a poor hundred pounds a-year, the slender portion which Mrs. Melliship brought her husband-the large settlements made upon her at her marriage being absolutely surrendered for the benefit of the creditors. For their advantage, too, the books, pictures, and furniture are to be sold.

It is the last day the Melliships have to spend in their old house. For, obeying the usual instinct of broken people, they have decided on going to London, and hiding their poverty and ruin where no one will be likely to see it. The wounded beast seeks the thickest covert, where it can die undisturbed: the stricken Briton looks for the deepest solitude, which is in the streets of infinite London, where he may brood over his sorrows, and meditate fresh enterprises. Kate Melliship goes sadly from room to

VOL. IX.

Price 2d.

room, taking her farewell of all that she has known and loved so long. There are the stately bookcases, the portfolios of prints and drawings, the music, the pianos, the very chairs and sofas which have witnessed their happy hours. Dry-eyed, but with a breaking heart, she turns over the leaves of the books, and takes a last look at the pictures in the portfolios. Nothing is to be taken away. They have decided, Frank and she, because their mother is helpless, that nothing but the barest necessaries of clothing is to be retained by them, not even the smallest trinket, not the most precious keepsake, not the most trifling memento. Whatever happens, they will be able to say that, in the wreck of their father's house, they too were wrecked and lost their all. Even the ring upon her finger, with her father's hair, will to-night go into the jewel box, and in a few days be put up to sale with the rest. Alas for this wrenching up of all the tendrils and branching roots with which a girl's affection clings to her home! Agony as was that bitter awaking when the shrieks of the maid roused Kate from her sleep in the early morning, it almost seems as if this is worse, when everything has to be left behind, and of the father who cherished and loved her so tenderly, nothing will be left at all but the memory. Surely, it were something to have a few books of his-to preserve some little token, the sight of which would always bring him back to mind. It is not to be; and poor Kate, too wretched for tears, sits silent and sad in the lonely, fireless room, and feels as if there were no more possibility of life, or light, or joy.

Let me try to depict her.

She is, like her brother, fair-haired; and, like him, tall. Not so fascinating as Grace Heathcote, she has a certain dignity of bearing which makes her more striking in appearance. Grace is a maiden fair-Kate is a queen. Grace is a young man's goddess. For Kate, the Knight Bayard himself

NO. 217.