many other indirect sacrifices. Grog was obliged for
a season to forego all the habits and profits of his daily life, to
live in a sort of respectable seclusion, his servants in mourning, and
himself in the deepest sable for the loss of a wife who had died
twelve years before. In fact, he had to take out a species of moral
naturalization, the details of which seemed interminable, and served to
convince him that respectability was not the easy, indolent thing he had
hitherto imagined it.

If Davis had been called on to furnish a debtor and creditor account of
the transaction, the sum spent in the accomplishment of this feat would
have astonished his assignee. As he said himself, "Fifteen hundred
would n't see him through it." It is but fair to say that the amount so
represented comprised the very worst of bad debts, but Grog cared little
for that; his theory was that there was n't the difference between a
guinea and a pound in the best bill from Baring's and the worst paper in
Holywell Street. "You can always get either your money or your money's
worth," said he, "and very frequently the last is the better of the
two."

If it was a proud day for the father as he consigned his daughter to
Madame Godarde's care, it was no less a happy one for Lizzy Davis,
as she found herself in the midst of companions of her own age,
and surrounded with all the occupations and appliances of a life of
elegance. Brought up from infancy in a small school in a retired part
of Cornwall, she had only known her father during the two or three off
months of that probationary course of respectability we have alluded
to. With all his affection for his child, and every desire to give it
utterance, Davis was so conscious of his own defects in education,
and the blemishes which his tone of mind and thought would inevitably
exhibit, that he had to preserve a sort of estrangement towards her, and
guard himself against whatever might prejudice him in her esteem. If,
then, by a thousand acts of kindness and liberality he gained on her
affection, there was that in his cold and distant manner that as totally
repelled all confidence. To escape from the dull uniformity of that
dreary home, where a visitor never entered, nor any intercourse with
the world was maintained, to a scene redolent of life, with gay
light-hearted associates, all pursuing the same sunny paths, to engage
her brilliant faculties in a variety of congenial pursuits, wherein
there was onl