wishes I rose to depart, "madam there, who looks so pleased and speaks so kindly, may be sure of her mat. I'm a 'dustrious man, thof I say it that should not say it; and Bessy's a 'dustrious girl; and, in my mind, there's nothing beats 'dustry in high or in low."

And, with this axiom from the old matmaker, Dash and I took our leave of four as happy people for by this time Jem had joined the party-as could well be found under the

sun.

219

HESTER.

AMONGST the most prominent of the Belfordians who figured at the Wednesday night's club at the King's Arms, was a certain portly personage, rather broader than he was long, who was known generally through the town by the familiar appellation of Nat Kinlay. By calling, Nat

"Was,―could he help it ?—a special attorney;" by habit and inclination, a thorough good fellow played the best rubber, sang the best song, told the best story, made the best punch

- and drank the most of it when made, of any man in Belford. Besides these accomplishments, he was eminently agreeable to men of all ranks; had a pleasant word for everybody.; was friendly with the rich, generous to the poor, never out of spirits, never out of humour, and,

in spite of the quips and cranks in which he delighted, never too clever for his company: the most popular person in the place was, beyond all doubt, Nat Kinlay.

In spite, however, of his universal popularity, and of a general tendency to overrate his colloquial talents, no attorney in the town had so little employment. His merits made against him in his profession almost as strongly as his faults: frank, liberal, open-hearted, and indulgent, as well as thoughtless, careless, daring, and idle; a despiser of worldly wisdom, a hater of oppression, and a reconciler of strife—he was about the last person to whom the crafty, the overbearing, or the litigious, would resort for aid or counsel. The prudent were repelled by his heedlessness and procrastination, and the timid alarmed at his levity; so that the circumstance which he told as a good joke at the club, of a spider having spun a web over the lock of his office-door (as over the poor-box in Hogarth's famous picture), was no uncommon occurrence at his residence. Except by a few of the poorest and wildest of his boon companions,-penniless clients, who lived at his table

all the while their suits were pending, and took care to disappear just before their cause was lost, the mysterious-looking brass knob, with "OFFICE-BELL" underneath it, at Mr. Kinlay's excellent house in Queen-street, remained unrung from term to term.

Startling as such a circumstance would have seemed to most professional men, it was long before this total absence of profitable employment made the slightest impression on Nat Kinlay. The son of an affluent tradesman in a distant county, he had been articled to a solicitor, rather as a step in station, an advance towards gentility, than with any view to the moneymaking facilities of that lucrative calling. His father, judging from his own frugal habits, thought that Nat, the only child amongst a large family of wealthy brothers, would have money enough, without making himself a slave to the law; and when the early death of his parents put him in possession of thirty thousand pounds lawful money of Great Britain, besides the great draper's shop in the little town of Cranley where that money had been accumulated, to say nothing of the stock and

good-will, and divers messuages and tenements, gardens and crofts, in and about the aforesaid Nat was most decidedly of the same

town

opinion.

But, extravagant in every sense of the word, luxurious in his habits, prodigal in his generosity, expensive in his tastes, easy and uncalculating as a child, the thirty thousand pounds, between building and driving, and card-playing and good-fellowship-(for sporting he was too unwieldy and too idle, or that would undoubtedly have been added to the catalogue of the spendthrift's sins,) the thirty thousand pounds melted away like snow in the sunshine; the produce of the shop, gardens, crofts, messuages, and tenements—even the humble dwelling in which his father had been born, and his grandfather had laid the foundation of the family prosperity in the humble vocation of a tailor,— disappeared with equal rapidity; and Nat Kinlay was on the very verge of ruin, when the death of a rich uncle relieved him from his difficulties, and enabled him to recommence his career of dissipation.

In the course of a few years his funds were