plan of marrying Ellen on the first day he could legally do
so. This date was a little delayed by the change of abode from Laystall
Street to Blackfriars, but on the first day that it could be done it was
done. He had never had more than 250 pounds a year, even in the times of
his affluence, so that a profit of 5 pounds a week, if it could be
maintained steadily, would place him where he had been as far as income
went, and, though he should have to feed two mouths instead of one, yet
his expenses in other ways were so much curtailed by his changed social
position, that, take it all round, his income was practically what it had
been a twelvemonth before. The next thing to do was to increase it, and
put by money.

Prosperity depends, as we all know, in great measure upon energy and good
sense, but it also depends not a little upon pure luck--that is to say,
upon connections which are in such a tangle that it is more easy to say
that they do not exist, than to try to trace them. A neighbourhood may
have an excellent reputation as being likely to be a rising one, and yet
may become suddenly eclipsed by another, which no one would have thought
so promising. A fever hospital may divert the stream of business, or a
new station attract it; so little, indeed, can be certainly known, that
it is better not to try to know more than is in everybody's mouth, and to
leave the rest to chance.

Luck, which certainly had not been too kind to my hero hitherto, now
seemed to have taken him under her protection. The neighbourhood
prospered, and he with it. It seemed as though he no sooner bought a
thing and put it into his shop, than it sold with a profit of from thirty
to fifty per cent. He learned book-keeping, and watched his accounts
carefully, following up any success immediately; he began to buy other
things besides clothes--such as books, music, odds and ends of furniture,
etc. Whether it was luck or business aptitude, or energy, or the
politeness with which he treated all his customers, I cannot say--but to
the surprise of no one more than himself, he went ahead faster than he
had anticipated, even in his wildest dreams, and by Easter was
established in a strong position as the owner of a business which was
bringing him in between four and five hundred a year, and which he
understood how to extend.

CHAPTER LXXIII

Ellen and he got on capitally, all the better, perhaps, because the
disparity between them was so