but there was melancholy in his laughter; something
in the forlorn, benighted, fatherless, squalid miser went to the core of
his open, generous heart.

"Do you ever read your Bible," said he, after a pause, "or even the
newspaper?"

"I does not read nothing; cos vy? I haint been made a scholard, like
swell Tim, as was lagged for a forgery."

"You go to church on a Sunday?"

"Yes; I 'as a weekly hingagement at the New Road."

"What do you mean?"

"To see arter the gig of a gemman vot comes from 'Igate."

Percival lifted his brilliant eyes, and they were moistened with a
heavenly dew, on the dull face of his fellow-creature. Beck made a
scrape, looked round, shambled back to the door, and ran home, through
the lamp-lit streets of the great mart of the Christian universe, to sew
the gold in his mattress.

CHAPTER III. EARLY TRAINING FOR AN UPRIGHT GENTLEMAN.

Percival St. John had been brought up at home under the eye of his
mother and the care of an excellent man who had been tutor to himself
and his brothers. The tutor was not much of a classical scholar, for in
great measure he had educated himself; and he who does so, usually lacks
the polish and brilliancy of one whose footsteps have been led early
to the Temple of the Muses. In fact, Captain Greville was a gallant
soldier, with whom Vernon St. John had been acquainted in his own brief
military career, and whom circumstances had so reduced in life as to
compel him to sell his commission and live as he could. He had always
been known in his regiment as a reading man, and his authority looked up
to in all the disputes as to history and dates, and literary anecdotes,
which might occur at the mess-table. Vernon considered him the most
learned man of his acquaintance; and when, accidentally meeting him in
London, he learned his fallen fortunes, he congratulated himself on
a very brilliant idea when he suggested that Captain Greville should
assist him in the education of his boys and the management of his
estate. At first, all that Greville modestly undertook, with respect to
the former, and, indeed, was expected to do, was to prepare the young
gentlemen for Eton, to which Vernon, with the natural predilection of
an Eton man, destined his sons. But the sickly constitutions of the
two elder justified Lady Mary in her opposition to a public school; and
Percival conceived early so strong an affection for a sailor's life that
the father's intentions were frust