No change the summer sun can bring,
Or even the changing skies of spring,
Or the bleak winter's stormy weather,
For we shall meet them, Love, together!

LAID UP IN TWO LODGINGS.

SECOND.—MY LONDON LODGING.

I LAST had the honour of presenting
myself to the reader's notice in the character of
an invalid laid up in lodgings at Paris. Let
me now be permitted to reappear as an
invalid laid up, for the time being, and very
uncomfortably, too, in a London cab. Let it
be imagined that I have got through the
journey from Paris, greatly to my own
surprise and satisfaction, without breaking down
by the way; that I have slept one night at a
London hotel for the first time in my life;
and that I am now helplessly adrift in a cab,
looking out for Furnished Apartments as near
as may be to my doctor's place of abode.
These are the few prefatory circumstances
of my present narrative on which it is
needless for me to enlarge. I mention them as
hints which may serve in the reader's fancy
to make the appropriate prologue to a sick
man's tale.

The cab is fusty, the driver is sulky, the
morning is foggy—I feel that a dry dog-
kennel would be a pleasant refuge for me by
comparison with the miserable vehicle in
which I am now jolting my way over the
cruel London stones. On our road to my
doctor's neighbourhood we pass through
Smeary Street, a locality well-known to the
inhabitants of Northern London. I feel that
I can go no farther. I remember that some
friends of mine live not far off, and I recklessly
emancipate myself from the torment of the
cab, by stopping the driver at the very first
house in the windows of which I see a bill
with the announcement that Apartments are
to Let.

The door is opened by a tall muscular
woman, with a knobbed face and knotty arms
besprinkled with a layer of grate-dust in a
state of impalpable powder. She shows me
up into a second-floor front bedroom. My
first look of scrutiny is naturally directed at
the bed. It is of the negative sort, neither
dirty nor clean; but, by its side, I see a
positive and unexpected advantage in
connection with it, in the shape of a long
mahogany shelf, fixed into the wall a few
inches above the bed, and extending down its
whole length from head to foot. My sick
man's involuntary egotism is as predominant
an impulse within me at London as at Paris.
I think directly of my invalid's knick-knacks:
I see that the mahogany shelf will serve to
keep them all within my reach when I am in
bed; I know that it will be wanted for no
other purpose than that to which I design to
put it; that it need not be cleared for dinner
every day, like a table, or disturbed when the
servant cleans the room, like a moveable ,
stand. I satisfy myself that it holds out all
these rare advantages to me, in my peculiar
situation, and I snap at them on the instant
—or, in other words, I take the room
immediately.

If I had been in health, I think I should
have had two cogent reasons for acting otherwise,
and seeking apartments elsewhere. In
the first place, I should have observed that
the room was not very clean or very
comfortably furnished. I should have noticed
that the stained and torn drugget on the
floor displayed a margin of dirty boards all
round the bedchamber; and I should no
sooner have set eyes on the venerable
armchair by the bedside than I should have
heard it saying privately in my ear, in an
ominous language of its own, " Stranger, I am
let to the Fleas: take me at your peril."
Even if these signs and portents had not
been enough to send me out into the street
again, I should certainly have found the
requisite warning to quit the house written
legibly in the face, figure, and manner of the
landlady. I should probably have seen
something to distrust and dislike in everything
connected with her, down even to her name,
which was Mrs. Glutch ; and I should have
thereupon taken refuge in some polite equivocation
(uttering probably, that long-established
formula of courteous deceit which is
expressed by the words, " Call again in an
hour"),—should have got into the street
under false pretences, and should not have
ventured near it any more for the rest of the
day. But as it was, my fatal invalid
prepossessions blinded me to everything but the
unexpected blessing of that mahogany shelf
by the bedside. I overlooked the torn drugget,
the flea-peopled arm-chair, and the
knotty-faced landlady with the ominous
name. The shelf was bait enough for me,
and the moment the trap was open, I
collected my train of medicine bottles and
confidently walked in.

It is a general subject of remark among
observant travellers, that the two nations of
the civilised world which appear to be most
widely separated as to the external aspects
of life respectively presented by them, are
also the two which are most closely brought
together by the neighbourly ties of local
situation. Before I had been many days
established in Smeary Street, I found that I
myself, in my own circumscribed sphere,
offered a remarkable example of the truth
of the observation just recorded. The strong
contrast between my present and my past life
was a small individual proof of the great
social contrasts between England and France.
I have truly presented myself at Paris, as
living independently in a little toy house of
my own; as looking out upon a scene of
almost perpetual brightness and gaiety; and as
having to attend on me people whose blessed
levity of disposition kept them always cheerful,
always quaintly characteristic, always
unexpectedly amusing, even to the languid