knew that the
master was in a humour that needed humouring.

Henry the younger had been the master for six years, since the death of
his father. The sudden decease of its head generally means financial
calamity for a family like the Knights. But somehow the Knights were
different from the average. In the first place Henry Knight was insured
for a couple of thousand pounds. In the second place Aunt Annie had a
little private income of thirty pounds a year. And in the third place
there was Henry Shakspere. The youth had just left school; he left it
without special distinction (the brilliant successes of the marred
Speech Day were never repeated), but the state of his education may be
inferred from the established fact that the headmaster had said that if
he had stayed three months longer he would have gone into logarithms.
Instead of going into logarithms, Henry went into shorthand. And
shorthand, at that date, was a key to open all doors, a cure for every
ill, and the finest thing in the world. Henry had a talent for
shorthand; he took to it; he revelled in it; he dreamt it; he lived for
it alone. He won a speed medal, the gold of which was as pure as the
gold of the medal won by his wicked cousin Tom for mere painting.
Henry's mother was at length justified before all men in her rosy
predictions.

Among the most regular attendants at the Great Queen Street Wesleyan
Chapel was Mr. George Powell, who himself alone constituted and
comprised the eminent legal firm known throughout Lincoln's Inn Fields,
New Court, the Temple, Broad Street, and Great George Street, as
'Powells.' It is not easy, whatever may be said to the contrary, to
reconcile the exigencies of the modern solicitor's profession with the
exigencies of active Wesleyan Methodism; but Mr. George Powell succeeded
in the difficult attempt, and his fame was, perhaps, due mainly to this
success. All Wesleyan solicitors in large practice achieve renown,
whether they desire it or not; Wesleyans cannot help talking about them,
as one talks about an apparent defiance of natural laws. Most of them
are forced into Parliament, and compelled against their wills to accept
the honour of knighthood. Mr. George Powell, however, had so far escaped
both Parliament and the prefix--a fact which served only to increase his
fame. In fine, Mr. George Powell, within the frontiers of Wesleyan
Methodism, was a lion of immense magnitude, and even beyond the
frontiers, in the vast unrege