he had caught Mr. Dounce,
whenever he thought no one was looking at him, bestowing ardent looks of
intense devotion on the lady in return; on which Mr. Harris and Mr.
Jennings used to laugh very heartily, and John Dounce more heartily than
either of them, acknowledging, however, that the time _had_ been when he
_might_ have done such things; upon which Mr. Jones used to poke him in
the ribs, and tell him he had been a sad dog in his time, which John
Dounce with chuckles confessed. And after Mr. Harris and Mr. Jennings
had preferred their claims to the character of having been sad dogs too,
they separated harmoniously, and trotted home.

The decrees of Fate, and the means by which they are brought about, are
mysterious and inscrutable. John Dounce had led this life for twenty
years and upwards, without wish for change, or care for variety, when his
whole social system was suddenly upset and turned completely
topsy-turvy--not by an earthquake, or some other dreadful convulsion of
nature, as the reader would be inclined to suppose, but by the simple
agency of an oyster; and thus it happened.

Mr. John Dounce was returning one night from the Sir Somebody's Head, to
his residence in Cursitor-street--not tipsy, but rather excited, for it
was Mr. Jennings's birthday, and they had had a brace of partridges for
supper, and a brace of extra glasses afterwards, and Jones had been more
than ordinarily amusing--when his eyes rested on a newly-opened
oyster-shop, on a magnificent scale, with natives laid, one deep, in
circular marble basins in the windows, together with little round barrels
of oysters directed to Lords and Baronets, and Colonels and Captains, in
every part of the habitable globe.

Behind the natives were the barrels, and behind the barrels was a young
lady of about five-and-twenty, all in blue, and all alone--splendid
creature, charming face and lovely figure! It is difficult to say
whether Mr. John Dounce's red countenance, illuminated as it was by the
flickering gas-light in the window before which he paused, excited the
lady's risibility, or whether a natural exuberance of animal spirits
proved too much for that staidness of demeanour which the forms of
society rather dictatorially prescribe. But certain it is, that the lady
smiled; then put her finger upon her lip, with a striking recollection of
what was due to herself; and finally retired, in oyster-like bashfulness,
to the very back of the counter. The