dversary. Or I
can play in another way. I won't have a cab at all, I will wait for the
omnibus: I will be one of the damp fourteen in that steaming vehicle. I
will wait about in the rain for an hour, and 'bus after 'bus shall pass,
but I will not be beat. I WILL have a place, and get it at length, with
my boots wet through, and an umbrella dripping between my legs. I have
a rheumatism, a cold, a sore throat, a sulky evening,--a doctor's bill
to-morrow perhaps? Yes, but I have won my game, and am gainer of a
shilling on this rubber.

If you play this game all through life it is wonderful what daily
interest it has, and amusing occupation. For instance, my wife goes to
sleep after dinner over her volume of sermons. As soon as the dear soul
is sound asleep, I advance softly and puff out her candle. Her pure
dreams will be all the happier without that light; and, say she sleeps
an hour, there is a penny gained.

As for clothes, parbleu! there is not much money to be saved in clothes,
for the fact is, as a man advances in life--as he becomes an Ancient
Briton (mark the pleasantry)--he goes without clothes. When my tailor
proposes something in the way of a change of raiment, I laugh in his
face. My blue coat and brass buttons will last these ten years. It is
seedy? What then? I don't want to charm anybody in particular. You say
that my clothes are shabby? What do I care? When I wished to look well
in somebody's eyes, the matter may have been different. But now, when I
receive my bill of 10L. (let us say) at the year's end, and contrast it
with old tailors' reckonings, I feel that I have played the game with
master tailor, and beat him; and my old clothes are a token of the
victory.

I do not like to give servants board-wages, though they are cheaper than
household bills: but I know they save out of board-wages, and so beat
me. This shows that it is not the money but the game which interests me.
So about wine. I have it good and dear. I will trouble you to tell me
where to get it good and cheap. You may as well give me the address of
a shop where I can buy meat for fourpence a pound, or sovereigns
for fifteen shillings apiece. At the game of auctions, docks, shy
wine-merchants, depend on it there is no winning; and I would as soon
think of buying jewellery at an auction in Fleet Street as of purchasing
wine from one of your dreadful needy wine-agents such as infest every
man's door. Grudge myself good wine? As soon grudge m