"You go to church on a Sunday?"

"Yes; I 'as a weekly hingagement at the New Road."

"What do you mean?"

"To see arter the gig of a gemman vot comes from 'Igate."

Percival lifted his brilliant eyes, and they were moistened with a
heavenly dew, on the dull face of his fellow-creature. Beck made a
scrape, looked round, shambled back to the door, and ran home, through
the lamp-lit streets of the great mart of the Christian universe, to sew
the gold in his mattress.




CHAPTER III.

EARLY TRAINING FOR AN UPRIGHT GENTLEMAN.

Percival St. John had been brought up at home under the eye of his mother
and the care of an excellent man who had been tutor to himself and his
brothers. The tutor was not much of a classical scholar, for in great
measure he had educated himself; and he who does so, usually lacks the
polish and brilliancy of one whose footsteps have been led early to the
Temple of the Muses. In fact, Captain Greville was a gallant soldier,
with whom Vernon St. John had been acquainted in his own brief military
career, and whom circumstances had so reduced in life as to compel him to
sell his commission and live as he could. He had always been known in