d
companies. It was amusing to see him swaggering about the City in his
clinking boots, and with his high and mighty dragoon manners. For a time
his talk about shares after dinner was perfectly intolerable; and I for
one was always glad to leave him in the company of sundry very dubious
capitalists who frequented his house, and walk up to hear Mrs. Fanny
warbling at the piano with her little children about her knees.

It was only last season that they set up a carriage--the modestest
little vehicle conceivable--driven by Kirby, who had been in Dixon's
troop in the regiment, and had followed him into private life as
coachman, footman, and page.

One day lately I went into Dixon's house, hearing that some calamities
had befallen him, the particulars of which Miss Clapperclaw was desirous
to know. The creditors of the Tregulpho Mines had got a verdict against
him as one of the directors of that company; the engineer of the
Little Diddlesex Junction had sued him for two thousand three hundred
pounds--the charges of that scientific man for six weeks' labor in
surveying the line. His brother directors were to be discovered nowhere:
Windham, Dodgin, Mizzlington, and the rest, were all gone long ago.

When I entered, the door was open: there was a smell of smoke in the
dining-room, where a gentleman at noonday was seated with a pipe and
a pot of beer: a man in possession indeed, in that comfortable pretty
parlor, by that snug round table where I have so often seen Fanny
Dixon's smiling face.

Kirby, the ex-dragoon, was scowling at the fellow, who lay upon a little
settee reading the newspaper, with an evident desire to kill him. Mrs.
Kirby, his wife, held little Danby, poor Dixon's son and heir. Dixon's
portrait smiled over the sideboard still, and his wife was up stairs
in an agony of fear, with the poor little daughters of this bankrupt,
broken family.

This poor soul had actually come down and paid a visit to the man in
possession. She had sent wine and dinner to "the gentleman down stairs,"
as she called him in her terror. She had tried to move his heart, by
representing to him how innocent Captain Dixon was, and how he had
always paid, and always remained at home when everybody else had fled.
As if her tears and simple tales and entreaties could move that man
in possession out of the house, or induce him to pay the costs of the
action which her husband had lost.

Danby meanwhile was at Boulogne, sickening after his