Who is that man facing our poor Auguste,
next the door, talking to the conductor? He is
one of the nameless mysterious people that are
always turning up in London, dirty and shabby,
unutterably dissipated, but with a handful of
gold and silver, and seemingly on good terms
with every one on the road and about the
public-house doors. He talks to Jim as if he were his
brother, and makes private and confidential
inquiries about 'Arry, and 'Arry's wife and
children (he calls her the missis, and them the kids);
and he knows all about the last fight, and enters
into deep arcana of letters that should have
been written, and of foul play that has been the
ruin of this and that; and I confess that lie
puzzles me, and unless he is a fighting-man, or
the keeper of a house of call for fighting-men,
or a translated driver who has made his fortune,
or else the conductor who wore a diamond ring
worth seventy pounds, and had a lady for a wife
with a diamond ring worth forty more, I
cannot tell who he is; I think, though, he keeps a
house of call somewhere in the Haymarket, and
that he rears bull pups for pleasure, and has a
"fancy" barman for sport.

The grave, severe, elderly gentleman,
evidently a wealthy merchant of impeccable
respectability, sitting next him, looks very much
as if he were eating a ghostly lemon, which sets
his mouth awry. It is a condescension on the
part of our wealthy merchant to ride in an
omnibus at all, but when he gets bracketed with
a fellow-traveller of the present calibre, his
gorge rises almost beyond his power to keep
down; and his wife and daughter wonder what
has made papa so cross to-day when he goes
home to dinner, and visions of an impending
bankruptcy sweep before mamma, naturally a
little timid and very lachrymose. If those
fluttered inmates of Westbourne-terrace knew
that dear papa had been submitted to such
contamination, how they would have sympathised
with him! As it is, for want of knowing, Mary
Matilda sulked, and Emma Jane flouted, and
poor dear mamma cried, and John was in the
dust with sackcloth round his calves and ashes
on his powder, because papa was in such an
awful humour, there was no bearing with him.
Was it really only the accidental presence of a
fighting-man in an omnibus that made all this
to-do?—or had yesterday's unlucky speculation
and to-day's opening of the purse-strings some
hand in the upset? I think old Mr. Doublecash,
the banker, could have dissected some part
of the load, though it might have been the last
straw that broke the camel's back, which had
not bent under the weight of iron.

Little care the couple next to the respectable
British merchant for anything in the world save
themselves. Both young, both silly, awfully in
love, and newly married, if life is not fairyland
to them now, I wonder when it will be, and to
whom! They have not a care; not the faintest
shadow of future anxiety lies across their footway;
there is no sickness in the world, no debt,
no poverty, no unkindness, no disappointment,
nothing but a huge wedding-cake, all sugar and
sweet almonds, decked with wedding favours
snow white, the edges unsoiled and the ends
unjagged. They were married just this day week;
and I can see the pretty, simple, country
wedding down among the mountains, where, I am
bound to say, if I would speak the truth, a
wedding of almost any kind is held as a maiden
triumph worthy any amount of pæans; for young
men of marriageable means are frightfully
scarce, and young ladies of marriageable age
just as much too rife in these remoter parts of
England. So that, when Cecilia Selina was
duly engaged and finally wedded to Harry
Augustus, it was something to be rejoiced at
even beyond the rejoicing of love. It was a
prize drawn in the lottery where so many must
turn up blanks. They have known each other
all their lives, these young people, but it was
only quite of late that they thought of being in
love at all; or at least that lie thought of it;
perhaps Cecilia Selina and her sisters might
have told a different story. To him, however,
it flashed out at once, and quite unexpectedly,
when he saw the attention which Mr. Wiseman,
the Cambridge tutor down for the season, paid
Miss Cecilia at the vicar's evening-party—she
in no wise resenting or discountenancing. Then
Mr. Harry Augustus hid the truth from himself
no longer; he confessed his love; he bought
the blue turquoise forget-me-not ring, de rigueur
in his estimation; he spoke to mamma, and he
asked papa; and, finally, in three months' time
from the day he "offered," was made the happy
husband of Cecilia Selina—coming up to London
for their honeymoon, as gay as larks and as
bright as peacocks. They have seen
everything, from the Tower to the Crystal Palace;
doing all the theatres, and all the exhibitions,
and all the sights, with unflagging spirits and
untiring muscles. They write long letters
every day to their sisters, and shed a reflexion
of their own sunshine on the quiet home by the
lake-side; and, then, they will go back the day
month of their marriage, neither sooner nor
later, and the vicar will give them a dinner, at
which their healths will be drank, Harry
Augustus being bound to make a speech in
reply; which he does, very fairly on the whole,
breaking down into a headless sentence, with
nothing to stand on, only at the last.

I wonder who is that fine-looking man, who
has just come in, taking up more than the room,
vacated by the two fair English boys. He is
a big, many-fleshed person, a man seeming to
belong to a larger generation than the present;
standing six foot full, in his shoes, and broad in
the proportion of his height and sixty years.
His hair, which is long and thick and wavy, is
snow white, as is his beard; but his eyes are
dark and lustrous, and his eyebrows black as
jet. He is wonderfully handsome, and of the
leonine type of manhood; a dangerous man in
his wrath I should say, but to be led by a child
in the silken cords of gentleness and love. He
may be any thing, civil or military: no, he
cannot be military! He has never gone through
the goose-step, or been drilled in a barrack-yard