been different? Heigho!" And
so Walter Harding went on to his business; while Tom Leslie, the member
of the party who was "peckish," accompanied the two girls, who were
decidedly hungry, to that over-gilt and tawdry caricature upon some of
the palace-halls of the Old World, known as "Taylor's Saloon."

CHAPTER XI.

SOME REFLECTIONS ON COMPARATIVE CHARACTER--OF HOUSES AS WELL AS
MEN--TEMPTATION, AND THE LEGENDS OF THE "LURLEY" AND THE "FROZEN
HAND"--A LUNCH AT TAYLOR'S, AND AN ARRANGEMENT.

In the "great day of final assize," when beneath the one unerring Eye
and Hand all the drosses of life and circumstance shall be melted away
and all the films and disfigurements removed from action and
intention,--there will be many things, we have reason to believe, shown
in a widely different light from that in which human eyes have looked
upon them. Human character will surprise the beholders, if it does not
produce the same effect even upon the subject under examination. Many a
poor wretch who has been stumbling along through life, unfortunate and
apparently guilty, of no seeming use either to himself or the world,
will be found to have filled a place of necessity not suspected--to have
done much good and very little harm--and to have been acting from
motives quite as pure as those that in other hearts have produced such
different effects. Many a "good" man will be stripped so bare of the
garments woven around him by circumstances or his own self-righteousness,
and so many of his best deeds will be proved to have proceeded from
selfish, interested and unholy motives, that every success and every word
of past approbation will be a reproach, and his naked soul will stand
shivering in the chilling breath of God's displeasure.

It is not exactly certain that _houses_ will come to judgment; but if
they do, there will be the same marked difference in the estimation in
which many of them have been held by the community surrounding them, and
the truth of their influence shown in the "sunlight of the eternal
morning." Some miserable tenant-house in Bermondsey or the Swamp,
overcrowded with human rats, its atmosphere so noisome that fever
floated on every breath and the passer-by from Belgravia or Murray Hill
put his perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils to escape the deadly
infection,--may be found to have been far less injurious to the
neighborhood than the corner-house on Park Lane or the double-front of
brown stone within t