d been leading by the hand. "Don't you go out of my sight; and
whatever you do, don't you do injury to those new clothes of yours, or
you'll wish you'd never been put into them. The truth is," continued
Hezekiah to his friend, his sole surviving son and heir being out of
earshot, "the morning tempted me. 'Tain't often I get a bit of fresh
air."

"Doing well?"

"The business," replied Hezekiah, "is going up by leaps and bounds--leaps
and bounds. But, of course, all that means harder work for me. It's
from six in the morning till twelve o'clock at night."

"There's nothing I know of," returned Solomon, who was something of a
pessimist, "that's given away free gratis for nothing except misfortune."

"Keeping yourself up to the mark ain't too easy," continued Hezekiah;
"and when it comes to other folks! play's all they think of. Talk
religion to them--why, they laugh at you! What the world's coming to, I
don't know. How's the printing business doing?"

"The printing business," responded the other, removing his pipe and
speaking somewhat sadly, "the printing business looks like being a big
thing. Capital, of course, is what hampers me--or, rather, the want of
it. But Janet, she's careful; she don't waste much, Janet don't."

"Now, with Anne," replied Hezekiah, "it's all the other way--pleasure,
gaiety, a day at Rosherville or the Crystal Palace--anything to waste
money."

"Ah! she was always fond of her bit of fun," remembered Solomon.

"Fun!" retorted Hezekiah. "I like a bit of fun myself. But not if
you've got to pay for it. Where's the fun in that?"

"What I ask myself sometimes," said Solomon, looking straight in front of
him, "is what do we do it for?"

"What do we do what for?"

"Work like blessed slaves, depriving ourselves of all enjoyments. What's
the sense of it? What--"

A voice from the perambulator beside him broke the thread of Solomon
Appleyard's discourse. The sole surviving son of Hezekiah Grindley,
seeking distraction and finding none, had crept back unperceived. A
perambulator! A thing his experience told him out of which excitement in
some form or another could generally be obtained. You worried it and
took your chance. Either it howled, in which case you had to run for
your life, followed--and, unfortunately, overtaken nine times out of
ten--by a whirlwind of vengeance; or it gurgled: in which case the
heavens smiled and halos descended on your head. In either event you