ved charge, stood
arrested with the rest, gazing joylessly on the blazing lamps, dead as
the stones he heeded, to the young vivacity of the one man, the solemn
visions of the other. So, O London, amidst the universal holiday to
monarch and to mob, in those three souls lived the three elements which,
duly mingled and administered, make thy vice and thy virtue, thy glory
and thy shame, thy labour and thy luxury; pervading the palace and the
street, the hospital and the prison,--enjoyment, which is pleasure;
energy, which is action; torpor, which is want!

CHAPTER II. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.

Suddenly across the gaze of Percival St. John there flashed a face that
woke him from his abstraction, as a light awakes the sleeper. It was as
a recognition of something seen dimly before,--a truth coming out from
a dream. It was not the mere beauty of that face (and beautiful it
was) that arrested his eye and made his heart beat more quickly, it was
rather that nameless and inexplicable sympathy which constitutes love
at first sight,--a sort of impulse and instinct common to the dullest as
the quickest, the hardest reason as the liveliest fancy. Plain Cobbett,
seeing before the cottage-door, at her homeliest of house-work, the
girl of whom he said, "That girl should be my wife," and Dante, first
thrilled by the vision of Beatrice,--are alike true types of a common
experience. Whatever of love sinks the deepest is felt at first sight;
it streams on us abrupt from the cloud, a lightning flash,--a destiny
revealed to us face to face.

Now, there was nothing poetical in the place or the circumstance, still
less in the companionship in which this fair creature startled the
virgin heart of that careless boy; she was leaning on the arm of a
stout, rosy-faced matron in a puce-coloured gown, who was flanked on the
other side by a very small, very spare man, with a very wee face, the
lower part of which was enveloped in an immense belcher. Besides these
two incumbrances, the stout lady contrived to carry in her hands an
umbrella, a basket, and a pair of pattens.

In the midst of the strange, unfamiliar emotion which his eye conveyed
to his heart, Percival's ear was displeasingly jarred by the loud,
bluff, hearty voice of the girl's female companion--

"Gracious me! if that is not John Ardworth. Who'd have thought it? Why,
John,--I say, John!" and lifting her umbrella horizontally, she poked
aside two city clerks in front of her, wheel