"Then sell two for me immediately, and buy me Pope's-toes at a hundred and two."

"Très bien-très bien," replies the agent, and away he scampers.

The "Pope's-toes" is a piece of the old lady's wit, and means Roman stock, which always keep up in the market.

"Tell me, Monsieur, what can I sell my Hayti loan for?" asks a tall thin woman, who is one of the greatest speculators in foreign securities.

"At 635 francs, Madame; and I-"

"And I—what? for you never finish your sentences, Monsieur." "Why, Madame, I was only about to counsel you to sell to-day, for there may be bad news in town."

"Run quickly then, I beseech you, Monsieur, for I wish to purchase Spanish actives."

And away he runs.

"Belgians are at what?" asks Mademoiselle somebody else of her dashing young coulissier.

"At 100 Mademoiselle-just at par."

"Ah! so 100 is par then? Excellent. So buy me a hundred of them."

Monsieur is very polite to Mademoiselle-and to tell the truth, she really is an exception to the rule of ugliness laid down for the

rest.

And there they are labouring, striving, speculating, and sinking capital, interest, and all (for such will be all their fates), whilst they are dancing on the verge of ruin, and thinking themselves happy. Those women gamesters are-odious!

But who is this old gentleman with a sort of John Barleycorn face, a proboscis for a nose, a carbuncle for a beauty spot, well powdered head, hat with a brim six inches wide, and who approaches us with arms extended, with mirthful face, and jocund air?

What! don't you know? Have you liv'd in Siberia all your life then?

No.

Well then, he is about the merriest old man we ever met with. Hear him.

What does he say?

"So long as France and England shall embrace each other, not a cannon can be fired without their permission!"

This has been his daily joke ever since 1830-his one idea, which nothing can disturb, is the English and French alliance.

What a droll-looking man he is! with immense coats, double Quaker-hats, cravats surrounding a treble chin, pantaloons à la Hollandaise, and himself not five feet high; he would be grotesque if he were not so merry, and disagreeable if he were not good tempered.

What a contrast he is to the coulissier who is approaching us, and who once fought a duel with a rival across a mahogany-table-not with pistols, but with blunderbusses! He shot his rival dead, and escaped unhurt. He is the wittiest man in Paris, but his wit is daggerish. What does he say!

"They tell me that some gentleman' agent de break. I have seen many gentlemen' in my day. May.-VOL. LXII. NO. CCXLV.

change is going to

There was' Gen

I

6

tleman' Robespierre, with his diamond buckles and his plaited wristbands! There was 'Gentleman' Napoleon with his 18th Brumaire, and his poison tricks at Jaffa! There was Gentleman' Louvel, who genteely murdered the Duke de Berri! There was Gentleman' Coste, who called the gentlemen' journalists together in July, and told them all, that it was their bounden duty to overthrow the true gentilhomme roi Charles X.! and since that time we have had nothing but gentlemen.' There were the gentlemen' pillagers of the Archbishop's palace; and the gentlemen' assassins of the Rue Transnonain; and the gentlemen' barricaders at Lyons; and then the 'gentlemen' prisoners before the Court of Peers! For my part, I call my valet a 6 gentleman,' and my shoe-black a gentleman'-not that I think them so-but to escape hanging. And now they tell me that another gentleman' agent de change is about to fail; and I, among the rest, am a sufferer! What a glorious land they have made of our France! How the Sullys, and d'Aguesseaus, and Mirabeaus, and Condés would admire her! Oh yes! Oh yes! we are all gentlemen' -all' gentlemen!' But give me back the blackguards, if these be the 'gentlemen!'"

All this was said with a rapidity quite indescribable, and a bitterness of irony only to be conceived. And then turning on his heel, without waiting either for a reply or a censure, for praise or for blame, he cried aloud,

"I have three thousand to sell for to-morrow."

But who is this that is approaching us?

C'est un homme de lettres-a writer of bitterness, as the last was a spouter of the same, but who can condense as much venom into six lines, as some writers can into six pages. He is indignant at the immense fluctuations in one day's Bourse; and he thus gives vent to his bile and his wrath:

"What can you expect, sir, from such a man as the present Minister of Finance? A mere printer of muslins, a mere maker of ginghams, a man who has never read any book but his own Journal of Sales and Purchases; who would ask you if you talked to him of Smith's Wealth of Nations'- What he had to do with nations, when he was only Minister of Finance for France?' And if you entreated him to read Say's Political Economy,' would answer you, That he was no politician, and that economy could have nothing to do with politics.' We are under the empire of the old ladies, and therefore our Finance Minister is a 'dealer in dimities.'"

But the clock advances; it is half past four;-the coulisse breaks up-stock-jobbing has ceased for the present-and all rush to dinner; but to renew their gambling at seven at the Café de Paris.

MORAL.-What a blessed thing it is to have no money to lose!

A PASSAGE IN THE LIFE OF ORLANDO SCRUBB.

BY LAMAN BLANCHARD, Esq.

"He was (could he help it?) a special attorney."

GOLDSMITH'S RETALIATION.

MANY years ago-say three-quarters of a century-Dick Scrubb (the name that clung to him from his cradle) was an ill-favoured, rickety, hopeless urchin, without a friend, in the parish-school at Limehouse. Last year, his mortal remains were removed from his splendid mansion in the most distinguished part of the west of London, and deposited with all possible funereal pomp in the family vault at Screwham. But he was Dick Scrubb still; or he was, at least, until that eventful moment when, as if Scrubb should separate from Dick, soul finally parted from body.

Mr. Scrubb's life-his "Life and Times" perhaps-must be written. hereafter; a single incident is all that can be related now. It will supply a guiding light to the future biographer; it will exhibit to the world the model for lawyers-a pattern-attorney.

As soon as the parish authorities could relieve themselves from the charge of Dick, they crowned their parochial philanthropy by putting him out as a junior fag in the office of a rising lawyer in that neighbourhood, who had lately wormed his way into a share of the vestry business, and was even then, as people conjectured, looking up to the dignity of the vestry-clerkship. Mr. Richard Winks declared that he was solely influenced by charitable motives in taking such a boy upon his "establishment;" but the truth was that Dick's peculiarly repulsive countenance was positively attractive in the eyes of Winks, who fancied he could detect therein a look of cunning and a coolness of purpose that might render the lad a drudge of no little utility-to be had at a cheap rate.

Into the first mysteries of an attorney's office was he therefore initiated; that is to say, he swept the floor, dusted the desk, and filled the coal-skuttle whenever, in the extremity of the cold season, a fire was allowed. By degrees, he ascended to a higher scale of duties; and every vestige of the charity-boy disappeared as he rose. The muffin-cap was first discarded, and Dick went forth "in very presence of the regal sun," with a real hat on his head; the coat of a past generation was substituted by a garment of a newer cut and soberer colour; and every other remnant of the barbarous costume of benevolence disappeared in due season.

This change was the result of the trifle per week which Mr. Winks now awarded him, in payment of his assiduity in posting backwards and forwards between the courts of law, in filling up blank forms, and arranging letters in pigeon-holes. From pouncing parchment, Dick's genius was advanced o the engrossing of it; he lost the title of errand-boy with the duties, as he escaped the appearance of a charitylad with the dress; and at seventeen he blazed forth all over Limehouse, an acknowledged and undeniable attorney's-clerk. He would now creep into the quietest corner of a public-house parlour one or

two evenings a week, and hear the little tradesmen of that district discuss the doings of great men; by which means he learned who Alderman Wilkes was, and came to have an opinion concerning my Lord North. After another year or two, still "progressing" in the law, he came out more boldly, and among the respectable tradespeople at the King's Arms, hazarded his sentiments over a measure of small ale (for he could afford no costlier beverage) in a more confident voice; so that those who remembered Dick as an inmate of the parish-school, would yet tolerate his company out of the consideration due to his attainments, remarking that learning was a fine thing, and charity no disgrace, not it.

Mr. Scrubb even then could certainly have afforded to indulge himself with richer and more abundant potations than those above specified, had it not been for certain costs to which he was put in the embellishment of his person. On this point he was particularly scrupulous. Not that he was ever foppishly-on the contrary, he was respectably attired; singularly ugly, and awkwardly put together, he contrived to obviate these disadvantages, so that Mr. Winks's clients, instead of exclaiming, "What a fright that scrub of a clerk is !" would be very apt to declare, that the young man looked quite as much of a gentleman as Mr. Winks himself.

And such was the impression beginning to prevail in the parlour of the King's Arms, whither Dick repaired to take his supper of toasted cheese, and such hop-flavoured fluids as his funds would afford; when one night, after he had been holding forth more eloquently than usual on the policy of the American war, and proving to the satisfaction of everybody that government could be carried on without any taxation at all in this country, simply by making the colonies pay for the honour of their connexion with it; to all which the lively landlady (a widow), as she sat in the bar opening into the parlour, had been listening with marked interest and curiosity;-after this had taken place, and after the company had knocked the ashes out of their last pipes, and retired -it was noticed that Dick did not retire also. It was whispered indeed that he sat up for two hours after the house had been closed for the night, sipping punch with the landlady in the bar, and conversing with extreme earnestness, but in a much lower key than before.

All that was positively known however was, that Mr. Scrubb never from that night ordered the same cheap, meagre, watery potations which had before sufficed to inspire his disquisitions on the doings of my Lord Chatham, and my Lord Rockingham, or the sayings of Junius and Mr. Wilkes. On the contrary, if he called for ale, it was the oldest and strongest, and he would take with it for his supper a choice delicacy from the larder, the speedy presence of which he commanded with a simple "See what you can do for me to-night." Quick following upon his repast, would come two, perhaps three, supplies of punch, mixed by the widow's own hand, which was acknowledged to be the most dexterous in the whole parish; and all this time perhaps Dick might be seen settled in the favourite seat by the fire, which the churchwarden once monopolised, stretching his legs out upon the fender, like a man who feels himself at home, and flatly contradicting Hickson, the rich hop-factor, in his theory of protective duties, or his notions on corn and the currency; and this he did with the air of one

who esteems himself at least as important as the best man in company.

Jokes about the sudden freedom of his manners, and the great length to which his score at the widow's must be running, would fly about at first, but they soon ceased. Indeed, if he seemed resolved to forget that he had figured all over that neighbourhood in parish costume, others were resolved to forget it too, and Dick Scrubb was no longer his appellation, at least in his presence. There was somehow about

him a sense of the " Orlando" which communicated itself to his companions, and they would as soon have presumed to designate Mr. Richard Winks, Dick Winks.

But no man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, and perhaps no clerk is a gentleman in the eye of his employer, the attorney. Mr. Winks, to whom these stolen marches in life on the part of Scrubb were perfect secrets, who never entered the King's Arms, and was unconscious of the popularity of his clerk, only knew that he had taken him some years before off the hands of the parish, trained, fed and clothed him, worked him up into an expert errand-boy, transformed him into a capital clerk, and, in short, strained, screwed, and twisted him into something like a gentlemanly-looking limb of the law. He considered him to be just as dependent now as when he wore the muffin-cap of charity on the side of his cropped head; the clerk was, in the attorney's regard, quite as much the attorney's private property as the poney on which he rode night and morning to his country-house at Bow.

What then was his amazement when, one day Dick entered the warm capetted roomat the back of the high-desked, dirty, fireless nook of an office, and after some mysterious flourishes announced his intention of resigning; literally, of resigning his seat on that stool, the leather whereof, whole when he first mounted it, now discovered a liberal proportion of the straw that stuffed it. Mr. Winks was breathless when he found out his clerk's real meaning. While Dick's preparatory flourish was going on, relative to the length of time he had served, and the legal knowledge he had acquired under the direction of his kind instructor, the attorney was settling in his mind how to avoid compliance with the naturally anticipated demand for an increase of salary; he had not consequently one word to say when Dick ended with," And so, sir, I have resolved to quit my post in your office, and set up in business for myself!" It was as though a powder-monkey had gone to Lord Howe, declining to do any more dirty work, and announcing his intention of turning conqueror, and taking the command of the fleet.

Dick took advantage of the breathlessness of his listener to proceed with extreme coolness and complacency, saying, that "He saw an opportunity of rising in the world, which it would be base and criminal in him to miss-that he had taken the necessary steps, and hoped very soon to be admitted as an attorney-at-law-that in the meantime he should carry on his business in the name of the eminent solicitors, Nisi and Prius of Eastcheap, and hoped for Mr. Winks's friendship in private life, although professionally they might be rivals."

The rage of Mr. Winks found vent at last with a violence which, as Mr. Scrubb observed, no gentleman could stay to listen to. A deep indentation, and a black stain, spreading in streams and splashes all over the inner door of the attorney's office, marked for a long time after the