lass over the
door was the word "Billiards."

Suiting the action to the word, the speaker plunged at once into the
aperture, and vanished. The boy-companion was following more slowly,
when his eye caught mine. A slight blush came over his dark cheek; he
stopped, and leaning against the door-jambs, gazed on me hard and long
before he said: "Well met again, sir! You find it hard to amuse yourself
in this dull place; the nights are long out of London."

"Oh!" said I, ingenuously, "everything here amuses me,--the lights, the
shops, the crowd; but, then, to me everything is new."

The youth came from his lounging-place and moved on, as if inviting
me to walk; while he answered, rather with bitter sullenness than the
melancholy his words expressed,--

"One thing, at least, cannot be new to you,--it is an old truth with us
before we leave the nursery: 'Whatever is worth having must be bought;'
ergo, he who cannot buy, has nothing worth having."

"I don't think," said I, wisely, "that the things best worth having can
be bought at all. You see that poor dropsical jeweller standing before
his shop-door: his shop is the finest in the street, and I dare say he
would be very glad to give it to you or me in return for our good health
and strong legs. Oh, no! I think with my father: 'All that are worth
having are given to all,'--that is, Nature and labor."

"Your father says that; and you go by what your father says? Of course,
all fathers have preached that, and many other good doctrines, since
Adam preached to Cain; but I don't see that the fathers have found their
sons very credulous listeners."

"So much the worse for the sons," said I, bluntly. "Nature," continued
my new acquaintance, without attending to my ejaculation,--"Nature
indeed does give us much, and Nature also orders each of us how to use
her gifts. If Nature give you the propensity to drudge, you will drudge;
if she give me the ambition to rise, and the contempt for work, I may
rise,--but I certainly shall not work."

"Oh," said I, "you agree with Squills, I suppose, and fancy we are all
guided by the bumps on our foreheads?"

"And the blood in our veins, and our mothers' milk. We inherit other
things besides gout and consumption. So you always do as your father
tells you! Good boy!"

I was piqued. Why we should be ashamed of being taunted for goodness,
I never could understand; but certainly I felt humbled. However, I
answered sturdily: "If you had as goo