y returns to the city; you see the
shops bustling up, trade flowing back. As birds scent the April, so the
children of commerce plume their wings and prepare for the first slack
returns of the season. But November! Strange the taste, stout the lungs,
grief-defying the heart, of the visitor who finds charms and joy in a
London November.

In a small lodging-house in Bulstrode Street, Manchester Square,
grouped a family in mourning who had had the temerity to come to town
in November, for the purpose, no doubt, of raising their spirits. In the
dull, small drawing-room of the dull, small house we introduce to you,
first, a middle-aged gentleman whose dress showed what dress now fails
to show,--his profession. Nobody could mistake the cut of the cloth and
the shape of the hat, for he had just come in from a walk, and not
from discourtesy, but abstraction, the broad brim still shadowed his
pleasant, placid face. Parson spoke out in him, from beaver to buckle.
By the coal fire, where, through volumes of smoke, fussed and flickered
a pretension to flame, sat a middle-aged lady, whom, without being a
conjurer, you would pronounce at once to be wife to the parson; and
sundry children sat on stools all about her, with one book between
them, and a low whispered murmur from their two or three pursed-up
lips, announcing that that book was superfluous. By the last of three
dim-looking windows, made dimmer by brown moreen draperies, edged
genteelly with black cotton velvet, stood a girl of very soft and
pensive expression of features,--pretty unquestionably, excessively
pretty; but there was something so delicate and elegant about her,--the
bend of her head, the shape of her slight figure, the little fair hands
crossed one on each other, as the face mournfully and listlessly turned
to the window, that "pretty" would have seemed a word of praise too
often proffered to milliner and serving-maid. Nevertheless, it was
perhaps the right one: "handsome" would have implied something statelier
and more commanding; "beautiful," greater regularity of feature, or
richness of colouring. The parson, who since his entrance had been
walking up and down the small room with his hands behind him, glanced
now and then at the young lady, but not speaking, at length paused
from that monotonous exercise by the chair of his wife, and touched
her shoulder. She stopped from her work, which, more engrossing than
elegant, was nothing less than what is technicall