George: there is a time for all things; I shall see you a judge yet, if you set your shoulder well to the wheel."

"Ah, I don't know! it's hard work in these days. A man can't get a hearing, you see; and he may fag his heart out, and live and die, and be screwed up and put underground, and no one be the wiser but his clerk and laundress. I declare I don't know what a barrister can get to do, while he is waiting for his first brief."

"A good many get into Parliament, or hope to do so, if they are noisy enough."

"Yes, I know; but that is after a fellow has been heard, not before. It has been suggested to me to try public life" (Mrs. Lackingham's counsel, I thought privately); " and I don't mean to say that, situated as I am" (and here his colour rose considerably), “if I had a place of 1,000l. per annum offered to me I should refuse it; but I should prefer working my own way up independently, if I could."

After he had left me, I fell into a long and rather melancholy reverie. How many men I

had known similarly situated, full of hope and vigour, whom I had watched grinding away in respectable penury, silence and neglect, for fifteen or twenty years, until some fortunate opportunity presented itself to enable them to take their proper position, and bring their long and carefully digested learning to bear. And how does it find them?—with hopes that have been so long deferred that the heart has sickened over them; with constitutions more than half broken up. Old men they are now, and looking even older than they are; they have married, unsuitably and beneath them—or they have done worse, and now they are clogged with ties ignoble as a gentleman, or sinful as a man. The game of life is sometimes played out sadly enough.

For some months I saw George Carnegie pretty frequently; then there was an interregnum in his visits, and when he next appeared there was an alteration in his manner, which caught my eye directly. Now there may rationally be traces of legitimate anxiety on the brow of a man who earns his daily bread-or, at least, hopes to

do so by the unremitting toil of his brain: these marks we expect, and they always rather ennoble a physiognomy than otherwise, in my eyes; but there seemed, I thought, a good deal more than this-a harassed, perturbed look, an irritability quite foreign to his nature, and an air of dejection about him, unless he were actually speaking: he would remain staring at the embers of the fire, in a sort of gloomy reverie, after his gayest sallies, and leave me silently and abruptly. One night, on an occasion like this, after a long hiatus in the conversation, it came out with a healthy burst,

"I tell you what, doctor, I don't half like that Mrs. Lackingham.”

"And why, George?" I demanded.

"Why?—well, that is just what bothers me; just what I ask myself. I do not know-at least I could not say in so many words; but I have a host of small things in my own mind against her. She seems so worldly-minded."

"That is too universal a failing to quarrel with her for, George; try something else."

"She is very false, and too affectionate by half:-mind, she did not seem all this at first."

“She threw a glamour over your eyes, perhaps.” "It did not strike me so, at any rate; but lately she has very much altered in her manner to me."

"It's there, is it? and the change is not an improvement," I said, jestingly.

"Don't vex me, or I'll say not one other word; that is not all. I think she is not kind to Marion: that is, not really kind; for the girl is so infatuatedly fond of her mother, that she takes the appearance for the reality, and will not hear a word of rebellion."

"So much the better does that look," I said. "I suppose I ought to think so, but I cannot

bring myself to do it.

is always so white and

Why is it that Marion

silent now, when I am

there, and that Mrs. Lackingham does all the talking? If I ask Marion a question, mamma answers, as though she were afraid of what might be the reply, and could not trust her daughter to deliver it; and I never see her alone-never."

"Be comforted; you have an indisputable right to that, surely, and she cannot keep you out of it always. Time will be your best friend."

"To say the truth, I suspect that, if a better parti came forward, my charming mother-in-law elect would quickly give me my congé."

"But if Miss St. Maur be all right, you need not be uneasy."

"She is so much under her mother's influence," he replied, in a dispirited manner.

"So she may be; but, by the laws of nature, a mother's influence must succumb to that of a husband."

"I'm not a husband yet," he said, as he drew on his gloves, preparatory to going.

66

Sperate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis. Good-night, George."

66

Virgil was not preaching à propos of a motherin-law when he said that," he retorted. "Goodnight."

Some little time after this, I encountered Miss St. Maur accidentally in society, though I was unable to stay.long enough to have an