“And I, too, must, by seeing it in your handwriting,
learn to reconcile myself to your new name.
Ah! I wish you had been still Clarence,—only
Clarence. Wealth, rank, power,—what
are all these but rivals to poor Flora?”
Lady Flora sighed, and the next moment blushed; and,
what with the sigh and the blush, Clarence’s
lips wandered from the hands to the cheek, and thence
to a mouth on which the west wind seemed to have left
the sweets of a thousand summers.
A Hounsditch man, one of the devil’s near kinsmen,—a
broker.—Every Man in His Humour.
We have here discovered the most dangerous piece of
lechery that ever was known in the commonwealth.—Much
Ado about Nothing.
It was an evening of mingled rain and wind, the hour
about nine, when Mr. Morris Brown, under the shelter
of that admirable umbrella of sea-green silk, to
which we have before had the honour to summon the
attention of our readers, was, after a day of business,
plodding homeward his weary way. The obscure
streets through which his course was bent were at
no time very thickly thronged, and at the present
hour the inclemency of the night rendered them utterly
deserted. It is true that now and then a solitary
female, holding up, with one hand, garments already
piteously bedraggled, and with the other thrusting
her umbrella in the very teeth of the hostile winds,
might be seen crossing the intersected streets, and
vanishing amid the subterranean recesses of some kitchen
area, or tramping onward amidst the mazes of the metropolitan
labyrinth, till, like the cuckoo, “heard,”
but no longer “seen,” the echo of her retreating
pattens made a dying music to the reluctant ear; or
indeed, at intervals of unfrequent occurrence, a hackney
vehicle jolted, rumbling, bumping over the uneven
stones, as if groaning forth its gratitude to the
elements for which it was indebted for its fare.
Sometimes also a chivalrous gallant of the feline
species ventured its delicate paws upon the streaming
pavement, and shook, with a small but dismal cry,
the raindrops from the pyramidal roofs of its tender
ears.
But, save these occasional infringements on its empire,
solitude, dark, comfortless, and unrelieved, fell
around the creaking footsteps of Mr. Morris Brown.
“I wish,” soliloquized the worthy broker,
“that I had been able advantageously to dispose
of this cursed umbrella of the late Lady Waddilove;
it is very little calculated for any but a single
lady of slender shape, and though it certainly keeps
the rain off my hat, it only sends it with a double
dripping upon my shoulders. Pish, deuce take
the umbrella! I shall catch my death of cold.”
