ime!

BOOK V.

CHAPTER I.

"Per ambages et ministeria deorum."--PETRONTUS.

[Through the mysteries and ministerings of the gods.]

Mr. Roger Morton was behind his counter one drizzling, melancholy day.
Mr. Roger Morton, alderman, and twice mayor of his native town, was a
thriving man. He had grown portly and corpulent. The nightly potations
of brandy and water, continued year after year with mechanical
perseverance, had deepened the roses on his cheek. Mr. Roger Morton was
never intoxicated--he "only made himself comfortable." His constitution
was strong; but, somehow or other, his digestion was not as good as it
might be. He was certain that something or other disagreed with him.
He left off the joint one day--the pudding another. Now he avoided
vegetables as poison--and now he submitted with a sigh to the doctor's
interdict of his cigar. Mr. Roger Morton never thought of leaving
off the brandy and water: and he would have resented as the height of
impertinent insinuation any hint upon that score to a man of so sober
and respectable a character.

Mr. Roger Morton was seated--for the last four years, ever since his
second mayoralty, he had arrogated to himself the dignity of a chair. He
received rather than served his customers. The latter task was left to
two of his sons. For Tom, after much cogitation, the profession of
an apothecary had been selected. Mrs. Morton observed, that it was a
genteel business, and Tom had always been a likely lad. And Mr. Roger
considered that it would be a great comfort and a great saving to have
his medical adviser in his own son.

The other two sons and the various attendants of the shop were plying
the profitable trade, as customer after customer, with umbrellas and in
pattens, dropped into the tempting shelter--when a man, meanly dressed,
and who was somewhat past middle age, with a careworn, hungry face,
entered timidly. He waited in patience by the crowded counter, elbowed
by sharp-boned and eager spinsters--and how sharp the elbows of
spinsters are, no man can tell who has not forced his unwelcome way
through the agitated groups in a linendraper's shop!--the man, I say,
waited patiently and sadly, till the smallest of the shopboys turned
from a lady, who, after much sorting and shading, had finally decided on
two yards of lilac-coloured penny riband, and asked, in an insinuating
professional tone,--

"What shall I show you, sir?"

"I wish to speak