o tenements
should know how to box or else to run: I could do neither. I got little
or nothing out of the devils and devillets, my respected uncle's
tenants. He had a genius for the despatch of business: I had none;
therefore he concluded I was an ass, and wondered how he came to be
pleased with me. Oh, 'tis a good thing to know what you can do, and to
do that, and know what you cannot do, and leave that alone. Dull as
weeds of Lethe was my task. 'Twas terrible! I thought it would never
end. No greater misery could be imagined than what I endured in
Nathan's service.

One morning of those days I picked up a note in Lydia's writing hastily
scrawled as follows: "I have discovered your retreat: I must see you.
At seven o'clock wave the lamp three times across the window if all is
well."

In my undecided way I pinned the note to the blue silk pincushion on
Lydia's dressing-case. I had a sudden jealous suspicion of an
acquaintance of ours, a furiously-striking English
traveller--"Bone-Boiler to the Queen" or something--who had a long,
silky, sweeping moustache blowing about in the wind, and parted his
hair "sissy." But I went to work all the same.

That day Uncle Nate was a worse screw than ever. "How is it you never
hit a clam?" asked he.

"Your tenants have nothing, so I get nothing," I replied.

"Nonsense! They must have something. Drunken loafers are driving about
in livery-rigs everywhere--sure sign of prosperity."

"Your people are not out," I said.

"They sit around the house reading yesterday's newspapers."

"They can't get work," said I.

"Everybody that wants to work is in the ditch now-a-days: _that_ I
_know_" said the old man.

"Some are sick."

"They are well enough to walk three miles to a brewery after a free
drink."

"Some are too young to work."

"Hah! what's the use of having a parcel of young ones to be poor
relations to the rest of the world?" asked he.

"Some are positively starving," said I.

"What of that? You have to let them starve. Five hundred thousand
starved in India last year, a country overrun with sacred snakes and
animals of all sorts that they might have eaten. Three millions starved
in China, and they tore up their English railway, the only thing that
could save them. What are you going to do about it? Starving! Bet they
are wallowing in the theatre every night," said Nathan.

"The theatre with Lawrence Barrett! I wish they might see anything so
elevating. Perhaps _Ot