woman to have the best of it,' muttered Merton admiringly. 'And
now, Clancy, may I offer a hasty luncheon to you and your friends before
we go to Lord's? Your business has been rather rapidly despatched.'

The conversation at luncheon turned exclusively on cricket.

VI. A LOVER IN COCKY

It cannot be said that the bearers of the noblest names in the land
flocked at first to the offices of Messrs. Gray and Graham. In fact the
reverse, in the beginning, was the case. Members even of the more
learned professions held aloof: indeed barristers and physicians never
became eager clients. On the other hand, Messrs. Gray and Graham
received many letters in such handwritings, such grammar, and such
orthography, that they burned them without replying. A common sort of
case was that of the young farmer whose widowed mother had set her heart
on marriage with 'a bonny labouring boy,' a ploughman.

'We can do nothing with these people,' Merton remarked. 'We can't send
down a young and elegant friend of ours to distract the affections of an
elderly female agriculturist. The bonny labouring boy would punch the
fashionable head; or, at all events, would prove much more attractive to
the widow than our agent.

'Then there are the members of the Hebrew community. They hate mixed
marriages, and quite right too. I deeply sympathise. But if Leah has
let her affections loose on young Timmins, an Anglo-Saxon and a
Christian, what can we do? How stop the mesalliance? We have not, in
our little regiment, one fair Hebrew boy to smile away her maiden blame
among the Hebrew mothers of Maida Vale, and to cut out Timmins. And of
course it is as bad with the men. If young Isaacs wants to marry Miss
Julia Timmins, I have no Rebecca to slip at him. The Semitic demand,
though large and perhaps lucrative, cannot be met out of a purely Aryan
supply.'

Business was pretty slack, and so Merton rather rejoiced over the
application of a Mrs. Nicholson, from The Laburnums, Walton-on-Dove,
Derbyshire. Mrs. Nicholson's name was not in Burke's 'Landed Gentry,'
and The Laburnums could hardly be estimated as one of the stately homes
of England. Still, the lady was granted an interview. She was what the
Scots call 'a buddy;' that is, she was large, round, attired in black,
between two ages, and not easily to be distinguished, by an unobservant
eye, from buddies as a class. After greetings, and when enthroned in the
client's chair, Mr