BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, Author of "David Elginbrod," "Alec Forbes," &c. CHAPTER I.-THE WALK TO THE COUNTING HOUSE. In the month of November, not many years ago, a young man was walking from Highbury to the City. It was one of those grand mornings that dawn only twice or thrice in the course of the year, and are so independent of times and seasons that November even comes in for its share. And it seemed as if young Thomas Worboise had at his toilette felt the influences of the weather, for he was dressed a trifle more gaily than was altogether suitable for the old age of the year. Neither however did he appear in harmony with the tone of the morning, which was something as much beyond the significance of his costume, as the great arches of a cathedral upheaving a weight of prayer from its shadowed heart towards the shadowless heavens are beyond the petty gorgeousness of the needlework that adorns the vain garments of its priesthood. It was a lofty blue sky, with multitudes of great clouds half-way between it and the earth, amongst which as well as along the streets a glad west wind was revelling. There was nothing much for it to do in the woods now, and it took to making merry in the clouds and the streets. And so the whole heaven was full of church-windows. Every now and then a great bore in the cloudy mass would shoot a sloped cylinder of sunrays earthwards, like an eye that saw in virtue of the light it shed itself upon the object of its regard. Gray billows of vapour with sunny heads tossed about in the air, an ocean for angelic sport, only that the angels could not like sport in which there was positively no danger. Where the sky shone through it looked awfully sweet, and profoundly high. But although Thomas enjoyed the wind on his right cheek as he passed the streets that opened into High Street, and although certain half sensations, half sentiments awoke in him at its touch, his look was oftenest down at his light trousers or his enamelled boots, and never rose higher than the shop-windows. As he turned into the churchyard to go eastward, he was joined by an acquaintance a few years older than himself, whose path lay in the same direction. "Jolly morning, aint it, Tom?" said he. "Ye-es," answered Thomas, with something of a fashionable drawl, and in the doubtful tone of one who will be careful how he either praises or condemns anything. "Ye-es. It almost makes one feel young again." 66 'Ha, ha, ha! How long is it since you enjoyed the pleasing sensation last?" "None of your chaff, now, Charles." "Well, upon my word, if you don't like chaff, you put yourself at the wrong end of the winnower." "I never read the Georgics." "Yes, I know I was born in the country-a clodhopper, no doubt, but I can afford to stand your chaff, for I feel as young as the day I was born. If you were a fast fellow, now, I shouldn't wonder; but for one like you that teaches in the Sunday School and all that, I am ashamed of you, talking like that. Confess now, you don't believe a word of what you cram the goslings with." "Charles, you may make game of me as you like, but I won't let you say a word against religion in my presence. You may despise me if you like, and think it very spoony of me to teach in the Sunday School, but-well, you know well enough what I mean." about your trowsers I was talking. It was about "I see nothing particular about yours." me. "Now you come to the point. That's just what II wanted to come to myself, only you wouldn't let You kept shying like a half-broke filly." "Come now, Charles, you know nothing about horses, I am very sure.' "I can guess at it, old fellow. Come, come, don't think to humbug me. You know as well as I do that you don't believe a word of it. I don't mean you want to cheat me or anyone else. believe you're above that. But you do cheat yourself. What's the good of it all when you don't feel half as merry as I do on a bright morning like this? I never trouble my head about that rubbish. am I as happy as I care to be-for to-day at least, and 'sufficient unto the day,' you know." Here 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 conversation was leading. He doubled. "If your soul be safe, Tom, why should you be so gloomy?" 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 trowsers, 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, or " "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 "Are there no souls to save but mine? There's "high sentence," which was just pure nonsense. yours now." "Is that why you put on your shiny trot-boxes, and your lavender trowsers, old fellow? Come, don't be stuck up. I can't stand it." 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 "As you please, Charles: I love you too much to sympathy and harmony with Lord Byron, a volume 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 trowsers. When I feel miserable about myself 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 to the counting-house, it had grown very thick. Through its reddish mass the gas-lights shone with the cold brilliance of pale gold. "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. The scene of their daily labour was not one of Sometimes I think it's freedom to do whatever I those grand rooms with plate-glass windows, which please. Sometimes I think it's a bottle of claret and now seem to be considered, if not absolutely neces a jolly good laugh. But to return to the trowsers." sary to commercial respectability, yet a not alto"Now leave my trowsers alone. It's quite dis-gether despicable means of arriving at such. It was gusting to treat serious things after such a fashion." a rather long, rather narrow, rather low, but this "I didn't know trowsers were serious things morning not so dark room as usual-for the whole except to old grandfather Adam. But it's not force of gas-burners was in active operation. In |