first slack returns of the season. But November! Strange the taste,
stout the lungs, grief-defying the heart, of the visitor who finds charms
and joy in a London November.

In a small lodging-house in Bulstrode Street, Manchester Square, grouped
a family in mourning who had had the temerity to come to town in
November, for the purpose, no doubt, of raising their spirits. In the
dull, small drawing-room of the dull, small house we introduce to you,
first, a middle-aged gentleman whose dress showed what dress now fails to
show,--his profession. Nobody could mistake the cut of the cloth and the
shape of the hat, for he had just come in from a walk, and not from
discourtesy, but abstraction, the broad brim still shadowed his pleasant,
placid face. Parson spoke out in him, from beaver to buckle. By the
coal fire, where, through volumes of smoke, fussed and flickered a
pretension to flame, sat a middle-aged lady, whom, without being a
conjurer, you would pronounce at once to be wife to the parson; and
sundry children sat on stools all about her, with one book between them,
and a low whispered murmur from their two or three pursed-up lips,
announcing that that book was superfluous. By the last of three dim-
looking windows, made dimmer by brown moreen draperies, edged genteelly
with black cotton velvet, stood a girl of very soft and pensive
expression of features,--pretty unquestionably, excessively pretty; but
there was something so delicate and elegant about her,--the bend of her
head, the shape of her slight figure, the little fair hands crossed one
on each other, as the face mournfully and listlessly turned to the
window, that "pretty" would have seemed a word of praise too often
proffered to milliner and serving-maid. Nevertheless, it was perhaps the
right one: "handsome" would have implied something statelier and more
commanding; "beautiful," greater regularity of feature, or richness of
colouring. The parson, who since his entrance had been walking up and