er
known who was the Co., for Richard Dryce managed his own business, and
lived in the house, in one of the back rooms of which overlooking a
square paved courtyard he had been born. The business belonged to his
father before him, and he himself had married into the business of
another factor and general merchant. His wife had died some twenty years
before the period of this story--died in giving birth to a boy, who was
sometimes mistaken for the Co., but who at present occupied no better
position than that of a superior clerk, with the questionable advantage
of living with his father in the dull old house, where he had to go
through the warehouse amidst innumerable bales and crates and packages
to reach the staircase that conducted him to the gloomy rooms, the
old-fashioned furniture of which suited his father, but was sorely
against his own taste.

How he should have come to have any opinion of his own is perhaps a
mystery, for he resembled his mother, who was a simple creature, easily
influenced, and with all her tastes apparently moulded on the pattern
set before her by her husband. Still, however it may have been, though
he was born in the gloomy house, and was subject to the same influences,
the younger Dryce--whose name was Robert--never took kindly to the dull
routine to which his father's habits doomed him. He was too dutiful and
too mild in disposition--in fact, too unlike his own father--to offer
any direct opposition to it, or to complain very often of its exactions;
but he felt that at twenty he was kept with too tight a hand, and that
there were worlds beyond Saint Simon Swynherde, which might be
harmlessly explored.

Richard Dryce was, however, not a bad man, not a cruel or a hard man in
his inmost heart; but he had been himself devoted from early life to one
condition of things, which were in some strange way in accordance with
his natural constitution, or with which he had become identified till
they grew into a necessary part of his existence. He was a
self-contained man--an undemonstrative man, whose mind was attuned to
respectable solitude, and who, without being a misanthrope, regarded his
fellow creatures through a ground-glass medium, which made them seem
shadowy and unapproachable. A few business acquaintances he had, with
whom he would sometimes take his chop and glass of old port at a city
tavern of an evening; he would even, on rare occasions, go the length of
smoking a cigar in company with