well possible. I said to myself, Fortune shall lift
you from the very dust of the high-road, Potts; not one advantageous
adjunct shall aid your elevation!

The train by which I was to leave did not start till noon, and to while
away time I took up a number of the "Times," which the "Goat" appeared
to receive at third or fourth hand. My eye fell upon that memorable
second column, in which I read the following:--

"Left his home in Dublin on the 8th ult, and not since been heard of,
a young gentleman, aged about twenty-two years, five feet nine and a
quarter in height, slightly formed, and rather stooped in the shoulders;
features pale and melancholy; eyes grayish, inclining to hazel; hair
light brown, and worn long behind. He had on at his departure--"

I turned impatiently to the foot of the advertisement, and found that
to any one giving such information as might lead to his discovery was
promised a liberal reward, on application to Messrs. Potts and Co.,
compounding chemists and apothecaries, Mary's Abbey. I actually grew
sick with anger as I read this. To what end was it that I built up a
glorious edifice of imaginative architecture, if by one miserable
touch of coarse fact it would crumble into clay? To what purpose did I
intrigue with Fortune to grant me a special destiny, if I were thus to
be classed with runaway traders or strayed terriers? I believe in my
heart I could better have borne all the terrors of a charge of felony
than the lowering, debasing, humiliating condition of being advertised
for on a reward.

I had long since determined to be free as regarded the ties of country.
I now resolved to be equally so with respect to those of family. I will
be Potts no longer. I will call myself for the future--let me see--what
shall it be, that will not involve a continued exercise of memory, and
the troublesome task of unmarking my linen? I was forgetting in this
that I had none, all my wearables being left behind at the Rosary.
Something with an initial P was requisite; and after much canvassing,
I fixed on Pottinger. If by an unhappy chance I should meet one who
remembered me as Potts, I reserved the right of mildly correcting him by
saying, "Pottinger, Pottinger! the name Potts was given me when at Eton
for shortness." They tell us that amongst the days of our exultation
in life, few can compare with that in which we exchange a jacket for
a tailed coat. The spring from the tadpole to the full-grown frog,
th