ul couple,
everything was settled, and they were to have been married on a New
Year's Day. But, somehow, Richard got it into his head, through what the
gentleman told him, that he might do better, and that he'd soon repent
it, and that she wasn't good enough for him, and that a young man of
spirit had no business to be married. And the gentleman frightened her,
and made her melancholy, and timid of his deserting her, and of her
children coming to the gallows, and of its being wicked to be man and
wife, and a good deal more of it. And in short, they lingered and
lingered, and their trust in one another was broken, and so at last was
the match. But the fault was his. She would have married him, sir,
joyfully. I've seen her heart swell, many times afterwards, when he
passed her in a proud and careless way; and never did a woman grieve
more truly for a man, than she for Richard when he first went wrong."

"Oh! he went wrong, did he?" said the gentleman, pulling out the
vent-peg of the table-beer, and trying to peep down into the barrel
through the hole.

"Well, sir, I don't know that he rightly understood himself, you see. I
think his mind was troubled by their having broke with one another; and
that but for being ashamed before the gentlemen, and perhaps for being
uncertain too, how she might take it, he'd have gone through any
suffering or trial to have had Meg's promise, and Meg's hand again.
That's my belief. He never said so; more's the pity! He took to
drinking, idling, bad companions: all the fine resources that were to be
so much better for him than the Home he might have had. He lost his
looks, his character, his health, his strength, his friends, his work:
everything!"

"He didn't lose everything, Mrs. Tugby," returned the gentleman,
"because he gained a wife; and I want to know how he gained her."

"I'm coming to it, sir, in a moment. This went on for years and years;
he sinking lower and lower; she enduring, poor thing, miseries enough to
wear her life away. At last he was so cast down, and cast out, that no
one would employ or notice him; and doors were shut upon him, go where
he would. Applying from place to place, and door to door; and coming for
the hundredth time to one gentleman, who had often and often tried him
(he was a good workman to the very end); that gentleman, who knew his
history, said, 'I believe you are incorrigible; there's only one person
in the world who has a chance of reclaiming you; a