PASSAGE IN THE LIFE OF MR. WATKINS TOTTLE. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 



MATRIMONY is proverbially a serious undertaking. Like an over- 

 weening predilection for brandy and water, it is a misfortune into 

 which a man easily falls, and from which he finds it remarkably dif- 

 ficult to extricate himself. It is no use telling a man who is timorous 

 on these points that it is but one plunge, and all is over. They say 

 the same thing at the Old Bailey, and the unfortunate victims derive 

 about as much comfort from the assurance in the one case as in the 

 other. 



Mr. Watkins Tottle was a rather uncommon compound of strong 

 uxorious inclinations, and an unparalleled degree of anti- connubial 

 timidity. He was about fifty years of age ; stood four feet six inches 

 and three-quarters in his socks for he never stood in stockings at 

 all plump, clean, and rosy. He looked something like a vignette 

 to one of Richardson's novels, and had a clean cravatish formality of 

 manner, and kitchen-pokerness of carriage, which Sir Charles Gran- 

 dison himself might have envied. He lived on an annuity, which 

 was well adapted to the individual who received it, in one respect it 

 was rather small. He received it in periodical payments on every 

 alternate Monday ; but he ran himself out about a day after the expi- 

 ration of the first week as regularly as an eight-day clock, and then, 

 to make the comparison complete, his landlady wound him up, and 

 he went on with a regular tick. 



Mr. Watkins Tottle had long lived in a state of single blessedness, 

 as bachelors say, or single cursedness, as spinsters think, but the idea 

 of matrimony had never ceased to haunt him. Wrapt in profound 

 reveries on this never-failing theme, fancy transformed his small 

 parlour in Cecil-street into a neat house in the suburbs the half- 

 hundred weight of coals under the kitchen-stairs suddenly sprang up 

 into three tons of the best Walls-End his small French bedstead 

 was converted into a regular matrimonial four-poster and on the 

 empty chair on the opposite side of the fire-place imagination seated 

 a beautiful young lady with a very little independence or will of her 

 own, and a very large independence under a will of her father's. 



" Who's there ?" inquired Mr. Watkins Tottle, as a gentle tap at 

 his room-door disturbed these meditations one evening. 



"Tottle, my dear fellow, how do you do?" said a short elderly 

 gentleman with a gruffish voice, bursting into the room, and replying 

 to the question by asking another, and then they shook hands with a 

 great deal of solemnity. 



" Told you I should drop in some evening," said the short gentle- 

 man, as he delivered his hat into Tottle's hand, after a little struggling 

 and dodging. 



" Delighted to see you, I'm sure," said Mr. Watkins Tottle, 

 wishing internally that his visitor had " dropped in" to the Thames 



