tail--and while his unshorn lips and nose together are performing
that mocking, boisterous, Jack-indifferent cry of "Clo', clo'!" who
knows what woeful utterances are crying from the heart within?
There he is, chaffering with the footman at No. 7 about an old
dressing-gown: you think his whole soul is bent only on the contest
about the garment. Psha! there is, perhaps, some faithless girl in
Holywell Street who fills up his heart; and that desultory Jew-boy
is a peripatetic hell! Take another instance:--take the man in the
beef-shop in Saint Martin's Court. There he is, to all appearances
quite calm: before the same round of beef--from morning till
sundown--for hundreds of years very likely. Perhaps when the
shutters are closed, and all the world tired and silent, there is HE
silent, but untired--cutting, cutting, cutting. You enter, you get
your meat to your liking, you depart; and, quite unmoved, on, on he
goes, reaping ceaselessly the Great Harvest of Beef. You would
fancy that if Passion ever failed to conquer, it had in vain
assailed the calm bosom of THAT MAN. I doubt it, and would give
much to know his history.

Who knows what furious Aetna-flames are raging underneath the
surface of that calm flesh-mountain--who can tell me that that
calmness itself is not DESPAIR?

* * *

The reader, if he does not now understand why it was that Mr. Hayes
agreed to drink the Corporal's proffered beer, had better just read
the foregoing remarks over again, and if he does not understand
THEN, why, small praise to his brains. Hayes could not bear that
Mr. Bullock should have a chance of seeing, and perhaps making love