and toasts which had been drunk to his prosperity, yet the prosperity
did not come. Of the hundred and fifty enthusiastic well-wishers who had
done honour to his entertainment, squeezed his hand, and sworn he was a
trump, not a dozen ever entered the house a second time. Do what he
would, Bowley could not create a business; and the corners of his mouth
began visibly to decline ere the experiment had lasted a couple of
months. He made a desperate effort to get up a Free-and-easy; he had the
old piano tuned, and set an old fellow to play upon it with open
windows; exhibited a perpetual announcement of 'A Concert this Evening;'
and himself led off the harmony, to the tune of _Tally-ho_, at the top
of his voice. It was all of no avail. The half-dozen grooms who joined
in feeble chorus did not pay the expense of the gas; and he found the
Free-and-easy, without abettors, the most difficult thing in the world.
So he gave it up, and fell into a brown study, which engrossed him for a
month. He had visions of Whitecross Street before his eyes; and poor Mrs
Bowley sighed again, and sighed in vain, after the remembrance of Sir
Plumberry's kitchen, and its vanished joys. The only symptom of business
was the gathering of half-a-dozen nightly customers, who sipped their
grog for an hour or two in the parlour; and one of these, moreover, had
never paid a farthing since he had patronised the house. There were
twenty grogs scored up against him, besides a double column of beers. Mr
Bowley will put an end to that, at anyrate; so he signals the bibulous
debtor, and having got him within the folds of the crimson curtains, he
politely informs him, that credit is no part of his system of doing
business, and requests payment. Mr Nogoe, the convivial defaulter, who
is a gentleman of fifty, who has seen the world, and knows how to manage
it, is decidedly of Bowley's opinion--that, as a general rule, credit is
a bad plan; inasmuch as, so far as his experience goes in the public
line, to afford it to your customers, is the first step towards losing
it yourself. But he feels himself free to confess, that he is at the