ity of dining, he felt that
bread and cheese, in the literal acceptation of the term, were really
indispensable to existence. Hence, one day, he invested his solitary
half-crown in the printing of a hundred cards, announcing that at the
"Classical and Commercial Day-school of Mr. ----, &c., Young Gentlemen were
instructed in all the Branches, &c., for the moderate sum of Two Shillings
weekly." These cards he distributed by the agency of the milkman in the
suburban and somewhat poor neighborhood, in which he occupied a couple of
rooms at the moderate rent of 7_s._ weekly. It was not long before a few
pupils made, one by one, their appearance at the would-be pedagogue's. As
they were mostly the sons of petty tradesmen round about, he raised no
objection to taking out their schooling in kind, and by this means earned
at least a subsistence till more prosperous times arrived, and publishers
discovered his latent merits. But for this device, he might not improbably
have shared the fate of Chatterton and others, less unscrupulous as to a
resource for the "mean time"--that rock on which so many an embryo genius
founders.

The misfortune of our next case was, not that _he_ abandoned the law, but
that the law abandoned _him_. He was a solicitor in a country town, where
the people were either so little inclined to litigation, or so happy in
not finding cause for it, that he failed from sheer want of clients, and,
as a natural consequence, betook himself to the metropolis--that Mecca
_cum_ Medina of all desperate pilgrims in search of fickle Fortune. There
his only available friend was a pastry-cook in a large way of business. It
so happened that the man of tarts and jellies was precisely at that epoch
in want of a foreman and book-keeper, his last prime-minister having
emigrated to America with a view to a more independent career. Our
ex-lawyer, feeling the consumption of tarts to be more immediately certain
than the demand for writs, proposed, to his friend's amazement, for the
vacant post; and so well did he fill it, that in a few years he had saved
enough of money to start again in his old profession. The pastry-cook and
his friends became clients, and he is at present a thriving attorney in
Lincoln's Inn, none the worse a lawyer for a practical knowledge of the
_pates_ filled by those oysters whose shells are the proverbial heritage
of his patrons.

A still more singular resource was that of a young gentleman, of no
particul