ade between Mr Vavasor and the
Macleods; but it came to be understood between them that if he made
no demand upon them for his daughter's money, and allowed them to
have charge of her education, they would do something for him. He was
a practising barrister, though his practice had never amounted to
much; and a practising barrister is always supposed to be capable of
filling any situation which may come his way. Two years after his
wife's death Mr Vavasor was appointed assistant commissioner in some
office which had to do with insolvents, and which was abolished three
years after his appointment. It was at first thought that he would
keep his eight hundred a year for life and be required to do nothing
for it; but a wretched cheeseparing Whig government, as John Vavasor
called it when describing the circumstances of the arrangement to his
father, down in Westmoreland, would not permit this; it gave him the
option of taking four hundred a year for doing nothing, or of keeping
his whole income and attending three days a week for three hours
a day during term time, at a miserable dingy little office near
Chancery Lane, where his duty would consist in signing his name to
accounts which he never read, and at which he was never supposed even
to look. He had sulkily elected to keep the money, and this signing
had been now for nearly twenty years the business of his life. Of
course he considered himself to be a very hardly-used man. One Lord
Chancellor after another he petitioned, begging that he might be
relieved from the cruelty of his position, and allowed to take his
salary without doing anything in return for it. The amount of work
which he did perform was certainly a minimum of labour. Term time, as
terms were counted in Mr Vavasor's office, hardly comprised half the
year, and the hours of weekly attendance did not do more than make
one day's work a week for a working man; but Mr Vavasor had been
appointed an assistant commissioner, and with every Lord Chancellor
he argued that all Westminster Hall, and Lincoln's Inn to boot, had
no right to call upon him to degrade himself by signing his name to
accounts. In answer to every memorial he was offered the alternative
of freedom with half his income; and so the thing went on.

There can, however, be no doubt that Mr Vavasor was better off and
happier with his almost nominal employment than he would have been
without it. He always argued that it kept him in London; but he
woul