fortune was still too recent and too
overwhelming.

How can so feeble a narrator as I, pretend to
describe the way in which Aunt Thompson
received the news; how she first turned tricolor
with surprise, then purple with delight, then
hysterical with joy; how she sat down and
rocked in her chair, and then laughed and then
cried! As I am not writing fiction, why should
I dilate on these obvious things?

The affair was kept secret for a week by Mr.
Dobbs's wish and Aunt Thompson's advice: the
only bad result of which secresy was, that it
destroyed the happiness of two aspiring men—
Mr. Tompkins, and the gay rattling honest guard
of the Colchester coach: both of whom proposed
to Susan within the week, and both of whom
were rejected.

IV. THE MARRIAGE.

NEVER had the important beadle of the
important parish of St. Margaret-Moses seen such
a marriage. There were ninety-four charity boys
and girls, with white satin favours on their left
arms. There was bell-ringing, almost Bedlamic
in its persistent and rejoicing jangle. There was
a parish dinner, at which Mr. Tompkins mournfully
presided, looking down between an avenue
of twelve white ties. The chimney of No. 16 for
a whole week smoked, and then for two whole
days the fire-engines could not be kept from the
house; and as for the ramonneur-men, their
brushes waved in St. Margaret-lane as Birnam
Wood when it came marching down on the
doomed castle of Macbeth. No Pickford van
came to Margaret-lane but the drivers were
feasted on good beef and ale, so lavishly did the
bridegroom's hospitality inundate and flood all
that came near that locality; at one time,
indeed, it was all Mr. Tompkins could do to
prevent the twelve frantic young men in
white ties from rushing into Cheapside, and
offering jugs of beer, to passing hackney-coachmen.

Mr. Dobbs had chosen a wife late in life; he
had chosen a young wife from a dangerous and
foolish impulse, and dared the radical publican
at the THREE MALT SHOVELS in Seething-lane;
but the radical publican was wrong, as parish
and other politicians have indeed been known
to be more than once. Mr. Dobbs had chosen
late and chosen hastily, but he had chosen with
the swift unerring instinct of a shrewd old
brain and an old but still unchilled heart.
He had dived into the great shoal-begirt
sea of matrimony, and found a pearl of
pearls.

He affected no hurricane of passion, no sighs
— no ceaseless vows and brittle protestations—
he loved calmly, respectfully, almost
paternally; but he loved (though he was a grocer)
as faithfully as your finest impossible lover in
fiction. He did not flatter Susan, or weary her
with servile adoration, but he showed her by a
thousand ceaseless quiet attentions how much
he loved her. When she told him of Mr. Tompkins's
proposal, and thought it would be better
he left (though she thought him a kind-hearted,
industrious fellow), Mr. Dobbs would not hear
of such a thing.

"No, Susan," he said; "there's no jealousy,
not a grain, in me. I love you too well. And
even if you never learned to love me, I know
Very well that you would love no other man,
my darling?"

A night or two after the wedding, when Susan
and Aunt Thompson were chatting alone on a
seat in pleasant Drapers' Gardens, Aunt Thompson,
foolishly enough, began to cry as if her
heart was going to break.

"Why, dear aunty, aunty, what is the
matter?" said Susan, fondling and kissing her
good old cheek.

"I'm afraid, dear— I've been thinking— I'm
afraid that now you are married, and are rich
and rolling in money, the beauty and wonder of
all St. Margaret-Moses— which you was the
very last Sunday as ever was— you'll be getting
ashamed of poor old aunt, and be sending me
off, for fear your new friends should think me
ignorant, and not fit for parlour visitors, and
out of place, and— oh!" (Here Niobe
became a mere drinking fountain to the Mississippi
of the good old creature's grief.)

How tenderly and softly Susan comforted
Aunt Thompson, and kissed her, and pulled off
her gloves, and patted her hands, and hugged
her waist, and assured her that if the Bank of
England got so full with dear Mr. Dobbs's
money that they actually refused to take in
any more of it for fear of a financial apoplexy,
still even in that contingency she (Susan) would
love and cherish her old aunt, who had been the
cause of all her good fortune, and had enabled
her to help poor William, and perhaps save his
life!

V. LAST SCENE OF ALL.

IN the second year of Susan's marriage she
gave birth to a son, much to the delight of the
whole parish of St. Margaret-Moses, and to the
special joy of Aunt Thompson and her crony
Mrs. Jones, now the pew-opener. Nine years
after the marriage, old Aunt Thompson died,
and eleven years after the marriage, Mr. Dobbs
died.

They were both buried in the black quiet
little churchyard of St. Margaret-Moses. No
pleasant trees cast wavering shadows upon their
tombstones, but mignonette bloomed sweet
close at hand, and sunshine came and glanced
across the sooty boughs of the solitary plane-tree,
and little melancholy precocious sparrows
chirped their embryo music, and little rosy faces
looked at the graves from between the rusty
rails, and little voices prattled of "dood Mr.
Dobbs," and of "dood Mrs. Thompson." And
those words were better than sham poems and
the lying flowers that often fall on grander
coffins.

One afternoon, two years later, Mr. Tompkins,
now rather corpulent and slightly bald, blurted
out a proposal of marriage to the rich and still