morning like this? I never trouble my head about that rubbish. Here am I as happy as I care to be for to-day at least, and sufficient unto the day,' you know."

6

Thomas might have replied, had he been capable of so replying, that although the evil is sufficient for the day, the good may not be. But he said something very different, although with a solemnity fit for an archbishop.

"There's a day coming, Charles, when the evil will be more than sufficient. I want to save my soul. You have a soul to save too."

"Possibly," answered Charles, with more carelessness than he felt; for he could not help being struck with the sententiousness of Thomas's reply, if not with the meaning contained in it. As he was not devoid of reverence, however, and had been spurred on to say what he had said more from the sense of an undefined incongruity between Thomas's habits, talk included, and the impression his general individuality made upon him, than from any wish to cry down the creed in which he took no practical interest, he went

no further in the direction in which the con

versation was leading. He doubled.

"If your soul be safe, Tom, why should you be so gloomy?"

"Are there no souls to save but mine? There's yours now."

"Is that why you put on your shiny trotboxes, and your lavender trousers, old fellow? Come, don't be stuck up. I can't stand it."

"As you please, Charles: I love you too much to mind your making game of me."

"Come now," said Charles Wither, "speak right out as I am doing to you. You seem to know something I don't. If you would only speak right out, who knows if you mightn't convert me, and save my soul too that you make such a fuss about. For my part, I haven't found out that I have a soul yet. What am I to do with it before I know I've got it? But that's not the point. It's the trousers. When I feel miserable about my

"Nonsense, Charles! You never do."

"But I do, though. I want something I haven't got often enough. And, for the life of me, I don't know what it is. Sometimes I think it's a wife. Sometimes I think it's freedom to do whatever I please. Sometimes I think it's a bottle of claret and a jolly good laugh. But to return to the trousers."

"Now leave my trousers alone. It's quite disgusting to treat serious things after such a fashion."

"I didn't know trousers were serious thingsexcept to old grandfather Adam. But it's not about your trousers I was talking.

about my own."

"I see nothing particular about yours."

It was

"That's because I'm neither glad nor sorry."

"What do you mean?"

"Now you come to the point.

That's just

what I wanted to come to myself, only you

wouldn't let me. You kept shying like a halfbroke filly."

"Come now, Charles, you know nothing about horses, I am very sure."

Charles Wither smiled, and took no other

notice of the asseveration.

"What I mean is this," he said, "that when I am in a serious, dull-gray, foggy mood, you know-not like this sky'

But when he looked up, the sky was indeed one mass of leaden gray. The glory of the unconditioned had yielded to the bonds of November, and-Ichabod.

"Well," Charles resumed, looking down again, "I mean just like this same sky over St. Luke's Workhouse here. Lord! I wonder if St. Luke ever knew what kind of thing he'd give his medical name to! When I feel like that, I never dream of putting on lavender trousers, you know, Tom, my boy. So I can't understand you, you know. I only put on such-like I never had such a stunning pair as those when I go to Richmond,

"Of a Sunday, I believe," said Worboise, nettled.

"Of a Sunday. Just so.

The better day,

the better deed, you know, as people say; though, I dare say, you don't think it."

"When the deed is good, the day makes it better. When the deed is bad, the day makes it worse," said Tom, with a mixture of reproof and "high sentence," which was just pure

nonsense.

How much of Thomas's depression was real, and how much was put on-I do not mean outwardly put on without being inwardly assumed-in order that he might flatter himself with being in close sympathy and harmony with Lord Byron, a volume of whose poems was at the time affecting the symmetry of his handsome blue frock-coat, by pulling down one tail more than the other, and bumping against his leg every step he took-I cannot exactly tell. At all events, the young man was-like most men, young and old-under conflicting influences; and these influences he had not yet begun to harmonize in any definite result.

By the time they reached Bunhill Fields, they were in a gray fog; and before they got