ing of
Parliament.

Yours most sincerely,

LAURA STANDISH.

Our London address will be No. 52, Grosvenor Place.

To this he wrote an answer as short, expressing his ardent wishes
that those winter hymeneals might produce nothing but happiness, and
saying that he would not be in town many days before he knocked at
the door of No. 52, Grosvenor Place.

And the second letter was as follows:--

Great Marlborough Street, December, 186--.

DEAR AND HONOURED SIR,

Bunce is getting ever so anxious about the rooms, and
says as how he has a young Equity draftsman and wife and
baby as would take the whole house, and all because Miss
Pouncefoot said a word about her port wine, which any lady
of her age might say in her tantrums, and mean nothing
after all. Me and Miss Pouncefoot's knowed each other for
seven years, and what's a word or two as isn't meant after
that? But, honoured sir, it's not about that as I write
to trouble you, but to ask if I may say for certain that
you'll take the rooms again in February. It's easy to
let them for the month after Christmas, because of the
pantomimes. Only say at once, because Bunce is nagging
me day after day. I don't want nobody's wife and baby to
have to do for, and 'd sooner have a Parliament gent like
yourself than any one else.

Yours umbly and respectful,

JANE BUNCE.

To this he replied that he would certainly come back to the rooms
in Great Marlborough Street, should he be lucky enough to find them
vacant, and he expressed his willingness to take them on and from
the 1st of February. And on the 3rd of February he found himself in
the old quarters, Mrs. Bunce having contrived, with much conjugal
adroitness, both to keep Miss Pouncefoot and to stave off the Equity
draftsman's wife and baby. Bunce, however, received Phineas very
coldly, and told his wife the same evening that as far as he could
see their lodger would never turn up to be a trump in the matter of
the ballot. "If he means well, why did he go and stay with them lords
down in Scotland? I knows all about it. I knows a man when I sees
him. Mr. Low, who's looking out to be a Tory judge some of these
days, is a deal better;--because he knows what he's after."

Immediately on his return to town, Phineas found himself summoned to
a political meeting at Mr. Mildmay's house in St. James's Square.
"We're going to begin in earnest this time,"