with few exceptions, are shabby-genteel
people.

CHAPTER XI--MAKING A NIGHT OF IT

Damon and Pythias were undoubtedly very good fellows in their way: the
former for his extreme readiness to put in special bail for a friend: and
the latter for a certain trump-like punctuality in turning up just in the
very nick of time, scarcely less remarkable. Many points in their
character have, however, grown obsolete. Damons are rather hard to find,
in these days of imprisonment for debt (except the sham ones, and they
cost half-a-crown); and, as to the Pythiases, the few that have existed
in these degenerate times, have had an unfortunate knack of making
themselves scarce, at the very moment when their appearance would have
been strictly classical. If the actions of these heroes, however, can
find no parallel in modern times, their friendship can. We have Damon
and Pythias on the one hand. We have Potter and Smithers on the other;
and, lest the two last-mentioned names should never have reached the ears
of our unenlightened readers, we can do no better than make them
acquainted with the owners thereof.

Mr. Thomas Potter, then, was a clerk in the city, and Mr. Robert Smithers
was a ditto in the same; their incomes were limited, but their friendship
was unbounded. They lived in the same street, walked into town every
morning at the same hour, dined at the same slap-bang every day, and
revelled in each other's company very night. They were knit together by
the closest ties of intimacy and friendship, or, as Mr. Thomas Potter
touchingly observed, they were 'thick-and-thin pals, and nothing but it.'
There was a spice of romance in Mr. Smithers's disposition, a ray of
poetry, a gleam of misery, a sort of consciousness of he didn't exactly
know what, coming across him he didn't precisely know why--which stood
out in fine relief against the off-hand, dashing,
amateur-pickpocket-sort-of-manner, which distinguished Mr. Potter in an
eminent degree.

The peculiarity of their respective dispositions, extended itself to
their individual costume. Mr. Smithers generally appeared in public in a
surtout and shoes, with a narrow black neckerchief and a brown hat, very
much turned up at the sides--peculiarities which Mr. Potter wholly
eschewed, for it was his ambition to do something in the celebrated
'kiddy' or stage-coach way, and he had even gone so far as to invest
capital in the purchase of a rough blue coat with wooden button