ily sat and wrote his sermons, and did all work that was done
by him within the house. The man who had made it, some time in the
last century, had intended it to be a locked guardian for domestic
documents, and the receptacle for all that was most private in the
house of some pater-familias. But beneath the hands of Mr. Crawley it
always stood open; and with the exception of the small space at which
he wrote, was covered with dog's-eared books, from nearly all of
which the covers had disappeared. There were there two odd volumes of
Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a
miniature Anacreon. There was half a Horace,--the two first books of
the Odes at the beginning and the De Arte Poetica at the end having
disappeared. There was a little bit of a volume of Cicero, and
there were Caesar's Commentaries, in two volumes, so stoutly
bound that they had defied the combined ill-usage of time and the
Crawley family. All these were piled upon the secretary, with many
others,--odd volumes of sermons and the like; but the Greek and Latin
lay at the top, and showed signs of most frequent use. There was one
arm-chair in the room,--a Windsor chair, as such used to be called,
made soft by an old cushion in the back, in which Mr. Crawley sat when
both he and his wife were in the room, and Mrs. Crawley when he was
absent. And there was an old horsehair sofa,--now almost denuded of
its horsehair,--but that, like the tables, required the assistance of
a friendly wall. Then there was half a dozen of other chairs,--all of
different sorts,--and they completed the furniture of the room. It
was not such a room as one would wish to see inhabited by a beneficed
clergyman of the Church of England; but they who know what money will
do and what it will not, will understand how easily a man with a
family, and with a hundred and thirty pounds a year, may be brought
to the need of inhabiting such a chamber. When it is remembered that
three pounds of meat a day, at ninepence a pound, will cost over
forty pounds a year, there need be no difficulty in understanding
that it may be so. Bread for such a family must cost at least
twenty-five pounds. Clothes for five persons, of whom one must at any
rate wear the raiment of a gentleman, can hardly be found for less
than ten pounds a year a head. Then there remains fifteen pounds for
tea, sugar, beer, wages, education, amusements, and the like. In such
circumstances a gentleman can ha