not have been quite so tolerant, had she known what sort of animal it was whose society he preferred to hers. This important business, however, having been transacted, Mr. Owlet prepared to flit, and Lord John, being also bound to the north, they agreed to meet on a certain evening in London, and travel together by the night-train to Liverpool. Had the home secretary issued a search-warrant on that occasion to examine the luggage of this eccentric pair, the officers employed would have made some extremely curious and amusing discoveries. In Owlet's portmanteau would have been found the wild costume and enormous beard in which he sustained the character of Balaam, a change of hairshirts, a discipline, a surplice, and a packet of letters containing his correspondence with the Mayor of Salisbury, relative to a procession of Flagellants, which the active canon had been desirous some months before of exhibiting in the streets of that ancient city. CHAPTER X. A wretched rascal, that will bind about The Staple of News. Christmas in the House of a Miser-Gripus and his Wife in Council-A Winter-piece-How Mrs. Narrowsmith affected the Thermometer-Who were to be asked to the House-warming-Proposition to invite the Bachelor to Tea-Isaac Narrowsmith resolves to give Champagne-His wife determines not to have Napkins-Character of Mr. Narrowsmith-Their Tea-table-How Providence sent the Miser a Silver Fourpence. VERY different were the Christmas doings in the house of Mr. Spread's partner, the new house of the Narrowsmiths in Rodneystreet. No comfort, no cheer, no charity. Neither hearts nor hearths were warm. No pleasantry brightened the countenanceno friends thronged the table-no pie towered upon the boardchallenging attack, and throwing down the gauntlet to voracity. The house was a fair one enough—the rooms sufficiently large—all the permanent accommodations reasonably complete-but it was bleak and dreary; penurious fires drew forth the damp without dispelling the cold; stinted draperies gave easy access to the wintry winds through the crevices of the windows; threadbare carpets left the floors as chill as those of vaults or warehouses: deficient furniture of mean quality, grim without antiquity, and rigidly excluding all the warm colors, consummated the dreary effect, and made it one of the last houses of the land (of houses roofed and glazed) in which any body in good-humor with himself and the world would wish to entertain his friends, or be entertained by them. Every thing in Rodney-street was managed upon the greatest possible retrenchment and the least possible comfort principle. Nothing was on a large scale but shabbiness; there was abundance of nothing but bad wine in the cellar and cold water on the table. This shivering and starving went, of course, as usual, by the specious name of economy, whereas it was extravagnace and waste of the most absurd kind, for there are two ways of squandering the gifts of fortune; they may be wasted in avarice as well as in prodigality, by a Nævius as well as by a Nomentanus. In a parlor, figuratively called a dining-room, by the side of what, metaphorically speaking, might be said to be the fire, sat in domestic council Mr. Narrowsmith and his wife. It was quite a winter-piece. The painter, to take the picture, should have been one whose line was boors in a frost. The room looked funereal, as if it had been furnished by an undertaker, and a particularly gloomy one. The curtains, newly hung, were of some paltry drab-colored stuff, and as much too narrow and too short as it was possible to make them, without their ceasing to suggest the idea that they were designed for curtains. A wretched Kidderminster, the more wretched for being new like the curtains, and much too small for the space to be covered, had been violently stretched and tortured with tacks to make the most of it; and when the most was made, it left a broad track of board extending all round the apartment, as bare as the pavement in the street. This track was studded with dingy mahogany chairs, few and far between, a dozen being required to do the duty of twice that number, like a garrison after a bloody siege. The shriveled rug on the hearth-stone made as poor an attempt to cover it as the tortured Kidderminster did to cover the floor. The cold black stone was only about three quarters concealed by it, and a villianously meager cat-a cat as lean as Cassius-sitting right in the center of the rug, with her green eyes pensively fixed upon the grate, as if she was pondering upon the vice of avarice, plainly proved that not so much as a fat mouse did credit to Mrs. Narrowsmith's housekeeping. Mr. Isaac Narrowsmith, a small, mean man, dressed in seedy black, with vulgar arithmetic in every line of his pinched and sallow features, little, sharp, suspicious eyes, and a nose not worth talking about, having made up his little mind to give a miserable dinner, was now debating with his worthy consort upon the guests to be invited, and the cheap dishes and false wines to be imposed upon such as should honor their bad cheer. It was to be at once their annual dinner to the Spreads, and a feast to celebrate their removal to Rodney-street from the baser quarter of the town where they had previously resided. If harmony of tastes is a pledge of happiness in the married state, Mr. and Mrs. Narrowsmith ought to have been happy as turtle-doves, for the lady was in her way, and in her de partments, as pitiful and griping as the gentleman. They had but one soul between them, and that might have been lodged in a nutshell. Mr. Spread (who, as we have seen, was one of the few who now condescend to read Pope) used to call them Mr. and Mrs. Gripus; and Philip, being fresh from the study of mechanics, gave them the sobriquet of the male and female screw. Mrs. Narrowsmith was a tall, muscular, harsh woman, with flat, square, pale, rigid, frigid features; she would have made an admirable matron of a work-house or a jail. When Mr. Narrowsmith married her, she was the widow of a rich planter in the West Indies, and she looked like a woman who could brandish the whip and wallop her negresses. She was about as genial as an icicle, and as mild a creature as a white bear after a bad day's fishing in the frozen seas. She was even harder, colder, and keener than her husband. The thermometer fell in her neighborhood; she actually radiated cold, and people who sat beside her got sore throats. She had one good point, her hair—that was beautiful—a golden brown, and remarkably luxuriant; but, as it were, to compensate for its beauty, it was clumsily arranged; part held in awkward captivity by a comb of spurious tortoise-shell, part falling in graceless negligence upon a shoulder unworthy to receive it. Of the maternal air and aspect she had nothing. Who could fancy that dry, harsh, frigid woman suckling a babe? though you could easily figure her to yourself chronicling small, very small, beer. What this incomparable lady wore upon the present occasion she almost always wore, except when she appeared at fétes. It was an old black silk dress, which not a maid-servant in Mrs. Spread's house would have put on her back. It was very tight, very short, and not worth five shillings. Its shortness had the agreeable effect of exhibiting stockings of a very subdued white, and shoes that looked as if they had been made by her husband's shoemaker. "How many shall we have ?" asked the miser, chafing his skinny fingers, preparing to count the list of his company upon them. "Ourselves, two; Maria, three—” Maria, or, more accurately, Maria Theresa, was the daughter and only child of the Narrowsmiths. She was twenty-three, and too like her mother to be much of a beauty, either in person or in mind; but she was too young to affect the thermometer in the same degree; besides, she had her mother's hair; and, having been three years at a boarding-school (where she learned to thump pianos, and call it music, to bedaub paper, and call it painting in water-colors), was considered in her circle a highly-accomplished young woman. Of course she was a great, that is to say, a rich match. She had not herself thought much about matrimony, but her considerate parents had been speculating for some time upon Philip Spread as an eligible husband for her. The Spreads had no notion that such a project was even in embryo. "Ourselves three, the Spreads five," continued the penurious merchant. 66 Only four Spreads—three and four are seven," said the lady. "Seven-the Neverouts won't." "Of course they won't; they never dine out in winter." Then why did Mrs. Narrowsmith invite them? Simply because they never dined out in winter. "What of the Marables?" "The Marables keep New Year's Day with old Mrs. Marable at Birkenhead. Maria ascertained it; don't they, Maria?" "Yes, mamma," replied Miss Narrowsmith. "But you asked them ?" continued Isaac. "I did, of course. We were so long in their debt that I positively felt ashamed. Now the compliment is paid, there's a weight off my mind." 66 Seven-George Voluble makes eight-the Crackenthorpes ten -Dr. and Mrs. Prout twelve. Will General Guydickens come?" Yes, and Miss Guydickens-he never dines out without her, and we can't do without the general's man." 66 66 Fourteen, said the miser, summing up. "I have been thinking it would be right to ask Mr. Spread's friend, Mr. Barker." "Won't it do to ask him to tea? The Reverend Mr. Thynne and Mr. Fitzroy, the commissioner, are only asked to tea. I'm told Mr. Barker is one of your London fine gentlemen, who cock up their noses at every thing, and can't dine without champagne and napkins. You can't be so infatuated, Mr. Narrowsmith, as to think of giving champagne ?" The miser crossed his legs, twirled his thumbs, and looked very serious and miserable; thinking of his partner's dinners, and of what was likely to be expected from a man worth a hundred thousand pounds. Then Mr. Crackenthorpe was a rail-way prince, and General Guydickens was a great rail-way man, too, and a sort of a nabob into the bargain. Isaac Narrowsmith was actually so infatuated as to be thinking of giving champagne, with some little fluctuation in his mind as to the question whether his champagne |