e day; everything and everybody looked cheerful and happy except
Mr. Augustus Minns.

The day was fine, but the heat was considerable; when Mr. Minns had
fagged up the shady side of Fleet-street, Cheapside, and
Threadneedle-street, he had become pretty warm, tolerably dusty, and it
was getting late into the bargain. By the most extraordinary good
fortune, however, a coach was waiting at the Flower-pot, into which Mr.
Augustus Minns got, on the solemn assurance of the cad that the vehicle
would start in three minutes--that being the very utmost extremity of
time it was allowed to wait by Act of Parliament. A quarter of an hour
elapsed, and there were no signs of moving. Minns looked at his watch
for the sixth time.

'Coachman, are you going or not?' bawled Mr. Minns, with his head and
half his body out of the coach window.

'Di-rectly, sir,' said the coachman, with his hands in his pockets,
looking as much unlike a man in a hurry as possible.

'Bill, take them cloths off.' Five minutes more elapsed: at the end of
which time the coachman mounted the box, from whence he looked down the
street, and up the street, and hailed all the pedestrians for another
five minutes.

'Coachman! if you don't go this moment, I shall get out,' said Mr. Minns,
rendered desperate by the lateness of the hour, and the impossibility of
being in Poplar-walk at the appointed time.

'Going this minute, sir,' was the reply;--and, accordingly, the machine
trundled on for a couple of hundred yards, and then stopped again. Minns
doubled himself up in a corner of the coach, and abandoned himself to his
fate, as a child, a mother, a bandbox and a parasol, became his
fellow-passengers.

The child was an affectionate and an amiable infant; the little dear
mistook Minns for his other parent, and screamed to embrace him.

'Be quiet, dear,' said the mamma, restraining the impetuosity of the
darling, whose little fat legs were kicking, and stamping, and twining
themselves into the most complicated forms, in an ecstasy of impatience.
'Be quiet, dear, that's not your papa.'

'Thank Heaven I am not!' thought Minns, as the first gleam of pleasure he
had experienced that morning shone like a meteor through his
wretchedness.

Playfulness was agreeably mingled with affection in the disposition of
the boy. When satisfied that Mr. Minns was not his parent, he
endeavoured to attract his notice by scraping his drab trousers with his
dirty shoes, poking