-house of that
pleasure-ground, and muse upon the strange coincidences of their life.
Lucy was motherless and fatherless; so too was Perkins. If Perkins was
brotherless and sisterless, was not Lucy likewise an only child? Perkins
was twenty-three: his age and Lucy's united, amounted to forty-six; and
it was to be remarked, as a fact still more extraordinary, that while
Lucy's relatives were AUNTS, John's were UNCLES. Mysterious spirit of
love! let us treat thee with respect and whisper not too many of thy
secrets. The fact is, John and Lucy were a pair of fools (as every young
couple OUGHT to be who have hearts that are worth a farthing), and were
ready to find coincidences, sympathies, hidden gushes of feeling, mystic
unions of the soul, and what not, in every single circumstance that
occurred from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, and in
the intervals. Bedford Row, where Perkins lived, is not very far from
Mecklenburgh Square; and John used to say that he felt a comfort that
his house and Lucy's were served by the same muffin-man.

Further comment is needless. A more honest, simple, clever,
warm-hearted, soft, whimsical, romantical, high-spirited young fellow
than John Perkins did not exist. When his father, Doctor Perkins, died,
this, his only son, was placed under the care of John Perkins, Esquire,
of the house of Perkins, Scully, and Perkins, those celebrated attorneys
in the trading town of Oldborough, which the second partner, William
Pitt Scully, Esquire, represented in Parliament and in London.

All John's fortune was the house in Bedford Row, which, at his father's
death, was let out into chambers, and brought in a clear hundred a
year. Under his uncle's roof at Oldborough, where he lived with thirteen
red-haired male and female cousins, he was only charged fifty pounds
for board, clothes, and pocket-money, and the remainder of his rents
was carefully put by for him until his majority. When he approached
that period--when he came to belong to two spouting-clubs at Oldborough,
among the young merchants and lawyers'-clerks--to blow the flute nicely,
and play a good game at billiards--to have written one or two smart
things in the Oldborough Sentinel--to be fond of smoking (in which act
he was discovered by his fainting aunt at three o'clock one morning)--in
one word, when John Perkins arrived at manhood, he discovered that he
was quite unfit to be an attorney, that he detested all the ways of his