cab, and drove away.
The remainder of the wedding party left the little church on foot.

The same evening on which this event took place, the strapping young man
and the little active youth sat together at the open window of a
comfortable though small parlour, enjoying a cup of tea. The view from
the window was limited, but it possessed the charm of variety;
commanding as it did, a vista of chimney-pots of every shape and form
conceivable--many of which were capped with those multiform and hideous
contrivances, with which foolish man vainly endeavours to cure smoke.

"Well, Jim," asked the strapping youth, as he gazed pensively on this
prospect, "what d'you think of it?"

"What do you refer to, Bob--our view or the wedding?"

"The wedding, of course."

"It's hard to say," replied Jim, musing. "He seemed to be such an
unmitigated scoundrel when we first made his acquaintance that it is
difficult to believe he is a changed man now."

"By which you mean to insinuate, Jim, that the Gospel is not sufficient
for out-and-out blackguards; that it is only powerful enough to deal
with such modified scoundrels as you and I were."

"By no means," replied Jim, with a peculiar smile; "but, d'you know,
Bloater, I never can feel that we were such desperate villains as you
make us out to have been, when we swept the streets together."

"Just listen to him!" exclaimed the Bloater, smiting his knee with his
fist, "you can't _feel_!--what have _feelings_ to do with knowledge?
Don't you _know_ that we were fairly and almost hopelessly _in the
current_, and that we should probably have been swept off the face of
the earth by this time if it had not been for that old gentleman with
the bald head and the kindly--"

"There, now, Bloater, don't let us have any more of that, you become
positively rabid when you get upon that old gentleman, and you are
conceited enough, also, to suppose that all the gratitude in the world
has been shovelled into your own bosom. Come, let us return to the
point, what do I think of the wedding--well, I think a good deal of it.
There is risk, no doubt, but there is that in everything sublunary. I
think, moreover, that the marriage is founded on _true love_. He never
would have come to his present condition but for true love to Martha,
which, in God's providence, seems to have been made the means of opening
his mind to Martha's _message_, the pith of which message was contained
in his last remark on le