isiting Canterbury on the chance of
something suitable turning up, and meeting me in Heep's company, was
subsequently engaged by Heep as a clerk at twenty-two and sixpence per
week.

It was only after Micawber had found that Uriah Heep had forged Mr.
Wickfield's name to various documents, and had fraudulently speculated
with moneys entrusted by my aunt, amongst others, to his partner, that
he turned upon him and denounced him, and accomplished what he called
"the final pulverisation of Keep."

Mr. Micawber being once more "in pecuniary shackles," my aunt, so
grateful, as we all were, for the services he had rendered, suggested
emigration to Australia to him; he at once responded to the idea.

"The climate, I believe, is healthy," said Mrs. Micawber. "Then the
question arises: Now, _are_ the circumstances of the country such that a
man of Mr. Micawber's abilities would have a fair chance of rising?--I
will not say, at present, to be governor or anything of that sort; but
would there be a reasonable opening for his talents to develop
themselves? If so, it is evident to me that Australia is the legitimate
sphere of action for Mr. Micawber."

"I entertain the conviction," said Mr. Micawber, "that it is, under
existing circumstances, the land, the only land, for myself and family;
and that something of an extraordinary nature will turn up on that
shore."

But the defeat of Heep and Micawber's departure belong to the days of my
manhood. Let me look back at intervening years.

_V.--I Achieve Manhood_

My school-days! The silent gliding on of my existence--the unseen,
unfelt progress of my life--from childhood up to youth!

Time has stolen on unobserved, and _I_ am the head boy now in the
school, and look down on the line of boys below me with a condescending
interest in such of them as bring to my mind the boy I was myself when I
first came here. That little fellow seems to be no part of me; I
remember him as something left behind upon the road of life, and almost
think of him as of someone else.

And the little girl I saw on that first day at Mr. Wickfield's, where is
she? Gone also. In her stead, the perfect likeness of the picture, a
child likeness no more, moves about the house; and Agnes--my sweet
sister, as I call her in my thoughts, my counsellor and friend--the
better angel of the lives of all who come within her calm, good,
self-denying influence--is quite a woman.

It is time for me to have a profess