. I am like the old hackney coach
horse, Mr. Weller--or is it Mr. Jingle--tells us of; if the shafts were
drawn away I should probably collapse. So I jog on, I jog on.'"

He had married late in life a common woman much younger than himself,
who had brought to him a horde of needy and greedy relatives, and no
doubt, as a refuge from her noisy neighbourhood, the daily peace of
Lombard Street was welcome to him. We saw her occasionally. She was
one of those blustering, "managing" women who go through life under
the impression that making a disturbance is somehow "putting things to
rights." Ridiculously ashamed of her origin, she sought to hide it under
what her friends assured her was the air of a duchess, but which, as
a matter of fact, resembled rather the Sunday manners of an elderly
barmaid. Mr. Gadley alone was not afraid of her; but, on the contrary,
kept her always very much in fear of him, often speaking to her with
refreshing candour. He had known her in the days it was her desire
should be buried in oblivion, and had always resented as a personal
insult her entry into the old established aristocratic firm of Stillwood
& Co.

Her history was peculiar. Mr. Stillwood, when a blase man about
town, verging on forty, had first seen her, then a fair-haired,
ethereal-looking child, in spite of her dirt, playing in the gutter. To
his lasting self-reproach it was young Gadley himself, accompanying his
employer home from Westminster, who had drawn Mr. Stillwood's attention
to the girl by boxing her ears for having, as he passed, slapped his
face with a convenient sprat. Stillwood, acting on the impulse of the
moment, had taken the child by the hand and dragged her, unwilling,
to her father's place of business--a small coal shed in the Horseferry
Road. The arrangement he there made amounted practically to the purchase
of the child. She was sent abroad to school and the coal shed closed.
On her return, ten years later, a big, handsome young woman, he married
her, and learned at leisure the truth of the old saying, "what's bred in
the bone will come out in the flesh," scrub it and paint it and hide it
away under fine clothes as you will.

Her constant complaint against her husband was that he was only a
solicitor, a profession she considered vulgar; and nothing "riled" old
Gadley more than hearing her views upon this point.

"It's not fair to the gals," I once heard her say to him. I was working
in the next room, with the