ese
flashes of imagination.

'Why, my case,' frowned the victim, throwing the end of his cigar into
the fire, and illustrating his argument by knocking the bottom of the pot
on the table, at intervals,--'my case is a very singular one. My
father's a man of large property, and I am his son.'

'That's a very strange circumstance!' interrupted the jocose Mr. Walker,
_en passant_.

'--I am his son, and have received a liberal education. I don't owe no
man nothing--not the value of a farthing, but I was induced, you see, to
put my name to some bills for a friend--bills to a large amount, I may
say a very large amount, for which I didn't receive no consideration.
What's the consequence?'

'Why, I suppose the bills went out, and you came in. The acceptances
weren't taken up, and you were, eh?' inquired Walker.

'To be sure,' replied the liberally educated young gentleman. 'To be
sure; and so here I am, locked up for a matter of twelve hundred pound.'

'Why don't you ask your old governor to stump up?' inquired Walker, with
a somewhat sceptical air.

'Oh! bless you, he'd never do it,' replied the other, in a tone of
expostulation--'Never!'

'Well, it is very odd to--be--sure,' interposed the owner of the flat
bottle, mixing another glass, 'but I've been in difficulties, as one may
say, now for thirty year. I went to pieces when I was in a milk-walk,
thirty year ago; arterwards, when I was a fruiterer, and kept a spring
wan; and arter that again in the coal and 'tatur line--but all that time
I never see a youngish chap come into a place of this kind, who wasn't
going out again directly, and who hadn't been arrested on bills which
he'd given a friend and for which he'd received nothing whatsomever--not
a fraction.'

'Oh! it's always the cry,' said Walker. 'I can't see the use on it;
that's what makes me so wild. Why, I should have a much better opinion
of an individual, if he'd say at once in an honourable and gentlemanly
manner as he'd done everybody he possibly could.'

'Ay, to be sure,' interposed the horse-dealer, with whose notions of
bargain and sale the axiom perfectly coincided, 'so should I.' The young
gentleman, who had given rise to these observations, was on the point of
offering a rather angry reply to these sneers, but the rising of the
young man before noticed, and of the female who had been sitting by him,
to leave the room, interrupted the conversation. She had been weeping
bitterly, and the