MARR1AGK A-LA-MODE, 



directing me to that owner, its adorable mistress. But then, why 

 not speak plainly in the indicative mood, and give me her address at 

 once ? Had the ambassadorial spirit forgotten part of its errand on 

 the way chilled into oblivion, perhaps, by the night-air, or scared 

 by the shout of some homeward-bound bacchanalian ? The words it 

 had uttered could surely have nothing to do with its commission ? 

 To say, at the moment when the cock was exerting his throat, tf the 

 morning herald !" was to say nothing at all. I knew well enough 

 before that chanticleer was known by that periphractic alias. As a 

 person of good education, and of more reading than is the wont of 

 modern clerks, I could not be ignorant of a thing which was, au 

 reste, sufficiently obvious of itself. 



These and other like and unlike speculations but added to the 

 nervous and fidgetty state which had now usurped me quite, and 

 had entirely superseded that orderly routine of mechanical habit so 

 essential to a civic situation. After all my efforts to qualify myself 

 for counting-house employ by smothering all my school-acquired ten- 

 dencies towards literature after having, by the force of arethmetical 

 progression, worked myself down, as I desperately thought and 

 abjectly hoped, into a machine behold all my labours overthrown, 

 my clerkly aspirations nullified, my figures reduced to a cipher ! 

 Vainly and blindly had I proposed to harden my soul against all 

 external motives, affections, senses, passions, and to devote all my 

 bachelor energies to the unceasing service of Messrs Marks, Wheeler, 

 Goudby, and Penny father. Alas ! I was spoiled for that employ 

 wedded already wedded to an image to a copy of a woman, taken, 

 it is true, from the life, but giving a mere shadow of the contentment 

 to be expected from the original. 



Oh ! how anxiously did I linger through the several dragging days 

 that followed that dream ! How ardently did I long for some fur- 

 ther vouchsafement, on each succeeding night, from the same darling 

 source ! But no, it came not. The slightest glimpse of it was 

 denied to my aching suspense, although I strained every faculty 

 to obtain that privilege, and even took a highly indigestive supper 

 at last, in the half-frantic hope of increasing my predisposition 

 to see any thing, or to dream any thing, that might favour my 

 object. 



Finding that nothing would do, and that in the mean while I could 

 do nothing, I threw up my situation with Marks and Co., and re- 

 nounced whatever advantages might belong to the machine-state, to 

 wander forth like a wild animal, whithersoever I might list, but list- 

 less whither Mr. Marks previously deducting a month's amount from 

 my salary on the score of deficient notice ; by which act of cool arith- 

 metic, by-the-by, the concern gained an immediate trifle, seeing that 

 they engaged a person to fill up my place on the following day. It 

 scarcely needs to be added that I withdrew also in disgust from the 

 musical club. Once it had been a satisfaction, once a week, there to 

 forget, in a " pastoral movement," or an " air, with variations," the 

 dull reign of the civic monotonies. But now now I retained no 

 idea of harmony, save with her whose image was 



'" Concordant with the life-strings of my soul !" 



