u will be tired
after your journey, and perhaps more inclined to talk to me than to
strangers."

Mr. Prendergast was one of those old-fashioned people who think that
a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a
hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a
narrow, lath and plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the
price out westward of the Parks. A quite new man is necessarily
afraid of such a locality as Bloomsbury Square, for he has no chance
of getting any one into his house if he do not live westward. Who
would dine with Mr. Jones in Woburn Terrace, unless he had known
Mr. Jones all his days, or unless Jones were known as a top sawyer
in some walk of life? But Mr. Prendergast was well enough known
to his old friends to be allowed to live where he pleased, and he
was not very anxious to add to their number by any new fashionable
allurements.

Herbert sent over to Bloomsbury Square to say that he would be there
at seven o'clock, and then sat himself down in his new lodgings. It
was but a dingy abode, consisting of a narrow sitting-room looking
out into the big square from over a covered archway, and a narrower
bedroom looking backwards into a dull, dirty-looking, crooked street.
Nothing, he thought, could be more melancholy than such a home. But
then what did it signify? His days would be passed in Mr. Die's
chambers, and his evenings would be spent over his law books with
closed windows and copious burnings of the midnight oil. For Herbert
had wisely resolved that hard work, and hard work alone, could
mitigate the misery of his present position.

But he had no work for the present day. He could not at once unpack
his portmanteau and begin his law studies on the moment. It was about
noon when he had completed the former preparation, and eaten such
breakfast as his new London landlady had gotten for him. And the
breakfast had not of itself been bad, for Mrs. Whereas had been a
daughter of Themis all her life, waiting upon scions of the law since
first she had been able to run for a penn'orth of milk. She had been
laundress on a stairs for ten years, having married a law stationer's
apprentice, and now she owned the dingy house over the covered way,
and let her own lodgings with her own furniture; nor was she often
without friends who would recommend her zeal and honesty, and make
excuse for the imperiousness of her ways and the too great fluency of
her by no means serv