makes a radical of a man. This is what
causes him to dream unwholesome dreams about equality and liberty, about
a republic, where there shall be no more principalities and powers, where
plutocracy, as well as aristocracy, shall be unregarded, and where every
good man and true shall rise on his own merits, and on none other.

Oh, happy and impossible Arcadia! You must wait for the millennium, my
friend, before your aspirations shall come to pass. Wait till jealousy,
and selfishness, and snobbism--that last and unconquerable dragon--shall
be destroyed out of the British heart, then, and only then, when jobbery,
and interest, and mammon-worship shall be abolished; then will men be
honoured for what they are, and not for what they seem to be.

Something of all this passed through our friend's jaundiced mind as he
contemplated those homely and familiar little birds, born and bred and
smoke-dried in all the turmoil of the City's heart, who ruffled their
feathers and plumed their wings with contented chirpings upon the dusty
flags of the little courtyard.

Things were exceptionally bad with Herbert Pryme just now. His exchequer
was low--had never been lower--and his sweetheart was far removed out of
his reach. Beatrice had duly come up with her parents to the family
mansion in Eaton Square for the London season, but although he had, it is
true, the satisfaction, such as it was, of breathing the same air as she
did, she was far more out of his reach in town than she had been in the
country. As long as she was at Shadonake Mr. Pryme had always been able
to run down to his excellent friend, the parson of Tripton, and once
there, it had been easy to negotiate a surreptitious meeting with
Beatrice. The fields and the lanes are everybody's property. If Tom and
Maria are caught love-making at the stile out of the wood, and they both
swear that the meeting was purely accidental, I don't see how any one is
to prove that it was premeditated; nor can any parents, now that it is no
longer the fashion to keep grown women under lock and key, prevent their
daughters from going out in the country occasionally unattended, nor
forbid strange young men from walking along the Queen's highway in the
same direction.

But remove your daughter to London, and the case is altered at once. To
keep a girl who goes out a great deal in the whirl of London society out
of the way of a man who goes out very little, who is not in the inner
circle of town li