financier, Mr. Montague Tigg, in "Martin Chuzzlewit." His chance
meeting with the romantic Comte de Monte Cristo naturally suggested
to him the plans and hopes which he unfolds to an unsympathetic
capitalist.


1542 Park Lane, May 27, 1848.

My Premium Pomegranate,--Oracles are not in it, David, with you, my
pippin, as auspicious counsellors of ingenious indigence. The
remark which you uttered lately, when refusing to make the trumpery
advance of half-a-crown on a garment which had been near to the
illustrious person of my friend Chevy Slime, that remark was
inspired. "Go to Holborn!" you said, and the longest-bearded of
early prophets never uttered aught more pregnant with Destiny. I
went to Holborn, to the humble establishment of the tuneful tonsor,
Sweedle-pipe. All things come, the poet says, to him who knows how
to wait--especially, I may add, to him who knows how to wait behind
thin partitions with a chink in them. Ensconced in such an ambush-
-in fact, in the back shop--I bided my time, intending to solicit
pecuniary accommodation from the barber, and studying human nature
as developed in his customers.

There are odd customers in Kingsgate Street, Holborn--foreign gents
and refugees. Such a cove my eagle eye detected in a man who
entered the shop wearing a long black beard streaked with the snows
of age, and who requested Poll to shave him clean. He was a
sailor-man to look at; but his profile, David, might have been
carved by a Grecian chisel out of an iceberg, and that steel grey
eye of his might have struck a chill, even through a chink, into