cordiality and friendship, and says all manner of kind and genial
things in a cheerful smile; then he raises his eyes to my clock,
which is just about to strike, and, glancing from it to me and back
again, seems to divide his heart between us. For myself, it is not
too much to say that I would gladly part with one of my poor limbs,
could he but hear the old clock's voice.

Of our two friends, the first has been all his life one of that
easy, wayward, truant class whom the world is accustomed to
designate as nobody's enemies but their own. Bred to a profession
for which he never qualified himself, and reared in the expectation
of a fortune he has never inherited, he has undergone every
vicissitude of which such an existence is capable. He and his
younger brother, both orphans from their childhood, were educated
by a wealthy relative, who taught them to expect an equal division
of his property; but too indolent to court, and too honest to
flatter, the elder gradually lost ground in the affections of a
capricious old man, and the younger, who did not fail to improve
his opportunity, now triumphs in the possession of enormous wealth.
His triumph is to hoard it in solitary wretchedness, and probably
to feel with the expenditure of every shilling a greater pang than
the loss of his whole inheritance ever cost his brother.

Jack Redburn - he was Jack Redburn at the first little school he
went to, where every other child was mastered and surnamed, and he
has been Jack Redburn all his life, or he would perhaps have been a
richer man by this time - has been an inmate of my house these
eight years past. He is my librarian, secretary, steward, and
first minister; director of all my affairs, and inspector-general
of my household. He is something of a musician, something of an