of a man even without a fit of the gout.

It is exactly what has just happened; an apprentice, called Gladstone,
having made a sort of connection in Manchester and Birmingham, a
district abounding in tall chimneys, has given warning to his master Pam
that he will not sweep any longer. He is a bold, aspiring sort of lad,
and he is not satisfied with saying--as many others have done--that he
is getting too broad-shouldered for his work; but he declares that the
chimneys for the future must be all made bigger and the flues wider,
just because he likes climbing, and doesn't mean to abandon it. There is
no doubt of it. Manchester and Stockport and Birmingham have put this in
his head. Their great smelting-houses and steam-power factories require
big chimneys; and being an overbearing set of self-made vulgar fellows,
they say they ought to be a law to all England. You don't want to make
cotton-twist, or broad-gauge iron; so much the worse for you. It is
the grandest object of humanity. Providence created men to manufacture
printed cottons and cheap penknives. We of Manchester understand what
our American friends call manifest destiny; we know and feel ours will
be--to rule England. Once let us only introduce big chimneys, and you'll
see if you won't take to spinning-jennies and mules and treddles;
and there's that climbing boy Gladstone declares he'll not leave the
business, but go up, no matter how dirty the flue, the day we want him.

Some shrewd folk, who see farther into the millstone than their
neighbours, have hinted that this same boy is of a crotchety, intriguing
type, full of his own ingenuity, and enamoured of his own subtlety;
so that make the chimney how great you will, he'll not go up it, but
scratch out another flue for himself, and come out, heaven knows where
or how. Indeed, they tell that on one occasion of an alarm of fire
in the house--caused by a pantry-boy called Russell burning some
wasterpaper instead of going up the chimney as he was ordered--this
same Will began to tell how the Greeks had no chimneys, and a mass
of antiquarian rubbish of the same kind, so that his master, losing
patience, exclaimed, "Of all plagues in the world he knew of none to
compare with these 'climbing boys!'"

LINGUISTS

There are two classes of people not a little thought of, and even
caressed, in society, and for whom I have ever felt a very humble
estimate--the men who play all manner of games, and the men who speak