f complacency as she contemplated the heir of Hunsden
Wood occupied in paying assiduous court to her darling Sarah Martha. I,
however, whose observations being less anxious, were likely to be more
accurate, soon saw that the grounds for maternal self-congratulation
were slight indeed; the gentleman appeared to me much more desirous of
making, than susceptible of receiving an impression. I know not what it
was in Mr. Hunsden that, as I watched him (I had nothing better to do),
suggested to me, every now and then, the idea of a foreigner. In form
and features he might be pronounced English, though even there one
caught a dash of something Gallic; but he had no English shyness: he had
learnt somewhere, somehow, the art of setting himself quite at his ease,
and of allowing no insular timidity to intervene as a barrier between
him and his convenience or pleasure. Refinement he did not affect, yet
vulgar he could not be called; he was not odd--no quiz--yet he resembled
no one else I had ever seen before; his general bearing intimated
complete, sovereign satisfaction with himself; yet, at times, an
indescribable shade passed like an eclipse over his countenance, and
seemed to me like the sign of a sudden and strong inward doubt of
himself, his words and actions-an energetic discontent at his life or
his social position, his future prospects or his mental attainments--I
know not which; perhaps after all it might only be a bilious caprice.

CHAPTER IV.

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of
his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against
wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, "I am baffled!" and
submits to be floated passively back to land. From the first week of my
residence in X---- I felt my occupation irksome. The thing itself--the
work of copying and translating business-letters--was a dry and tedious
task enough, but had that been all, I should long have borne with the
nuisance; I am not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the double
desire of getting my living and justifying to myself and others the
resolution I had taken to become a tradesman, I should have endured
in silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties; I should not have
whispered, even inwardly, that I longed for liberty; I should have pent
in every sigh by which my heart might have ventured to intimate its
distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of