n-leather armchair, with the villanous
lodging-house antimacassar over the back of it. It is good of you to
tell me how interested you are in my commonplace adventures; though if I
had not KNOWN that you were so, you may be sure that I should never have
ventured to inflict any of them upon you. My future is now all involved
in obscurity, but it is obvious that the first thing I must do is to
find a fitting house, and my second to cajole the landlord into letting
me enter into possession of it without any prepayment. To that I will
turn myself to-morrow morning, and you shall know the result. Whom
should I hear from the other day but Archie McLagan? Of course it was a
begging letter. You can judge how far I am in a state to lose money; but
in a hot fit I sent him ten shillings, which now, in my cold, I bitterly
regret. With every good wish to you and yours, including your town, your
State, and your great country, yours as ever.

XI. OAKLEY VILLAS, BIRCHESPOOL, 29th May, 1882.

Birchespool is really a delightful place, dear Bertie; and I ought to
know something about it, seeing that I have padded a good hundred miles
through its streets during the last seven days. Its mineral springs used
to be quite the mode a century or more ago; and it retains many traces
of its aristocratic past, carrying it with a certain grace, too, as an
emigre countess might wear the faded dress which had once rustled
in Versailles. I forget the new roaring suburbs with their out-going
manufactures and their incoming wealth, and I live in the queer
health-giving old city of the past. The wave of fashion has long passed
over it, but a deposit of dreary respectability has been left behind.
In the High Street you can see the long iron extinguishers upon the
railings where the link-boys used to put out their torches, instead of
stamping upon them or slapping them on the pavement, as was the custom
in less high-toned quarters. There are the very high curbstones too,
so that Lady Teazle or Mrs. Sneerwell could step out of coach or sedan
chair without soiling her dainty satin shoes. It brings home to me what
an unstable chemical compound man is. Here are the stage accessories
as good as ever, while the players have all split up into hydrogen
and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon, with traces of iron and silica and
phosphorus. A tray full of chemicals and three buckets of water,--there
is the raw material of my lady in the sedan chair! It's a curious