t man, a Baronet, perhaps.  The
old man thought he would die contented if he could see
his grandson in a fair way to such honours.  He would
have none but a tip-top college man to educate him--
none of your quacks and pretenders--no, no.  A few years
before, he used to be savage, and inveigh against all
parsons, scholars, and the like declaring that they were
a pack of humbugs, and quacks that weren't fit to get
their living but by grinding Latin and Greek, and a set
of supercilious dogs that pretended to look down upon
British merchants and gentlemen, who could buy up half
a hundred of 'em.  He would mourn now, in a very
solemn manner, that his own education had been neglected,
and repeatedly point out, in pompous orations to Georgy,
the necessity and excellence of classical acquirements.

When they met at dinner the grandsire used to ask
the lad what he had been reading during the day, and
was greatly interested at the report the boy gave of his
own studies, pretending to understand little George
when he spoke regarding them.  He made a hundred
blunders and showed his ignorance many a time.  It did not
increase the respect which the child had for his senior.
A quick brain and a better education elsewhere showed
the boy very soon that his grandsire was a dullard, and
he began accordingly to command him and to look down
upon him; for his previous education, humble and
contracted as it had been, had made a much better
gentleman of Georgy than any plans of his grandfather could
make him.  He had been brought up by a kind, weak,
and tender woman, who had no pride about anything
but about him, and whose heart was so pure and whose
bearing was so meek and humble that she could not but
needs be a true lady.  She busied herself in gentle offices
and quiet duties; if she never said brilliant things, she
never spoke or thought unkind ones; guileless and artless,
loving and pure, indeed how could our poor little Amelia
be other than a real gentlewoman!

Young Georgy lorded over this soft and yielding
nature; and the contrast of its simplicity and delicacy with
the coarse pomposity of the dull old man with whom
he next came in contact made him lord over the latter
too.  If he had been a Prince Royal he could not have
been better brought up to think well of himself.

Whilst his mother was yearning after him at home, and
I do believe every hour of the day, and during most
hours of the sad lonely nights, thinking of him, this young
gentleman had a number of pleasures and consolations
administered to him, which made him for his part bear
the separation from Amelia very easily.  Little boys who
cry when they are going to school cry because they
are going to a very uncomfortable place.  It is only a
few who weep from sheer affection.  When you think
that the eyes of your childhood dried at the sight of a
piece of gingerbread, and that a plum cake was a
compensation for the agony of parting with your mamma
and sisters, oh my friend and brother, you need not be
too confident of your own fine feelings.

Well, then, Master George Osborne had every comfort
and luxury that a wealthy and lavish old grandfather
thought fit to provide.  The coachman was instructed to
purchase for him the handsomest pony which could be
bought for money, and on this George was taught to
ride, first at a riding-school, whence, after having
performed satisfactorily without stirrups, and over the
leaping-bar, he was conducted through the New Road to
Regent's Park, and then to Hyde Park, where he rode
in state with Martin the coachman behind him.  Old
Osborne, who took matters more easily in the City now,
where he left his affairs to his junior partners, would
often ride out with Miss O.  in the same fashionable direction.
As little Georgy came cantering up with his dandified
air and his heels down, his grandfather would nudge
the lad's aunt and say, "Look, Miss O." And he would
laugh, and his face would grow red with pleasure, as
he nodded out of the window to the boy, as the groom
saluted the carriage, and the footman saluted Master
George.  Here too his aunt, Mrs. Frederick Bullock
(whose chariot might daily be seen in the Ring, with
bullocks or emblazoned on the panels and harness, and
three pasty-faced little Bullocks, covered with cockades
and feathers, staring from the windows) Mrs. Frederick
Bullock, I say, flung glances of the bitterest hatred at
the little upstart as he rode by with his hand on his side
and his hat on one ear, as proud as a lord.

Though he was scarcely eleven years of age, Master
George wore straps and the most beautiful little boots
like a man.  He had gilt spurs, and a gold-headed whip,
and a fine pin in his handkerchief, and the neatest little
kid gloves which Lamb's Conduit Street could furnish.
His mother had given him a couple of neckcloths, and
carefully hemmed and made some little shirts for him;
but when her Eli came to see the widow, they were
replaced by much finer linen.  He had little jewelled buttons
in the lawn shirt fronts.  Her humble presents had been put
aside--I believe Miss Osborne had given them to the
coachman's boy.  Amelia tried to think she was pleased
at the change.  Indeed, she was happy and charmed to
see the boy looking so beautiful.

She had had a little black profile of him done for a
shilling, and this was hung up by the side of another
portrait over her bed.  One day the boy came on his
accustomed visit, galloping down the little street at
Brompton, and bringing, as usual, all the inhabitants to the
windows to admire his splendour, and with great eagerness
and a look of triumph in his face, he pulled a case
out of his great-coat--it was a natty white great-coat,
with a cape and a velvet collar--pulled out a red
morocco case, which he gave her.

"I bought it with my own money, Mamma," he said.
"I thought you'd like it."

Amelia opened the case, and giving a little cry of
delighted affection, seized the boy and embraced him a
hundred times.  It was a miniature-of himself, very prettily
done (though not half handsome enough, we may be
sure, the widow thought).  His grandfather had wished
to have a picture of him by an artist whose works,
exhibited in a shop-window, in Southampton Row, had
caught the old gentleman's eye; and George, who had
plenty of money, bethought him of asking the painter
how much a copy of the little portrait would cost, saying
that he would pay for it out of his own money and
that he wanted to give it to his mother.  The pleased
painter executed it for a small price, and old Osborne
himself, when he heard of the incident, growled out his
satisfaction and gave the boy twice as many sovereigns
as he paid for the miniature.

But what was the grandfather's pleasure compared to
Amelia's ecstacy? That proof of the boy's affection
charmed her so that she thought no child in the world
was like hers for goodness.  For long weeks after, the
thought of his love made her happy.  She slept better
with the picture under her pillow, and how many many
times did she kiss it and weep and pray over it!  A
small kindness from those she loved made that timid
heart grateful.  Since her parting with George she had had
no such joy and consolation.

At his new home Master George ruled like a lord;
at dinner he invited the ladies to drink wine with the
utmost coolness, and took off his champagne in a way
which charmed his old grandfather.  "Look at him," the
old man would say, nudging his neighbour with a
delighted purple face, "did you ever see such a chap?
Lord, Lord!  he'll be ordering a dressing-case next, and
razors to shave with; I'm blessed if he won't."

The antics of the lad did not, however, delight Mr.
Osborne's friends so much as they pleased the old
gentleman.  It gave Mr. Justice Coffin no pleasure to hear
Georgy cut into the conversation and spoil his stories.
Colonel Fogey was not interested in seeing the little boy
half tipsy.  Mr. Sergeant Toffy's lady felt no particular
gratitude, when, with a twist of his elbow, he tilted a
glass of port-wine over her yellow satin and laughed at
the disaster; nor was she better pleased, although old
Osborne was highly delighted, when Georgy "whopped"
her third boy (a young gentleman a year older than
Georgy, and by chance home for the holidays from Dr.
Tickleus's at Ealing School) in Russell Square.  George's
grandfather gave the boy a couple of sovereigns for that
feat and promised to reward him further for every boy
above his own size and age whom he whopped in a
similar manner.  It is difficult to say what good the old man
saw in these combats; he had a vague notion that
quarrelling made boys hardy, and that tyranny was a useful
accomplishment for them to learn.  English youth have
been so educated time out of mind, and we have
hundreds of thousands of apologists and admirers of
injustice, misery, and brutality, as perpetrated among
children.  Flushed with praise and victory over Master Toffy,
George wished naturally to pursue his conquests further,
and one day as he was strutting about in prodigiously
dandified new clothes, near St.  Pancras, and a young
baker's boy made sarcastic comments upon his appearance,
the youthful patrician pulled off his dandy jacket
with great spirit, and giving it in charge to the friend
who accompanied him (Master Todd, of Great Coram
Street, Russell Square, son of the junior partner of the
house of Osborne and Co.), George tried to whop the
little baker.  But the chances of war were unfavourable
this time, and the little baker whopped Georgy, who
came home with a rueful black eye and all his fine shirt
frill dabbled with the claret drawn from his own little
nose.  He told his grandfather that he had been in
combat with a giant, and frightened his poor mother at
Brompton with long, and by no means authentic,
accounts of the battle.

This young Todd, of Coram Street, Russell Square,
was Master George's great friend and admirer.  They both
had a taste for painting theatrical characters; for
hardbake and raspberry tarts; for sliding and skating in the
Regent's Park and the Serpentine, when the weather
permitted; for going to the play, whither they were often
conducted, by Mr. Osborne's orders, by Rowson, Master
George's appointed body-servant, with whom they sat in
great comfort in the pit.

In the company of this gentleman they visited all the
principal theatres of the metropolis; knew the names of
all the actors from Drury Lane to Sadler's Wells; and
performed, indeed, many of the plays to the Todd family
and their youthful friends, with West's famous characters,
on their pasteboard theatre.  Rowson, the footman, who
was of a generous disposition, would not unfrequently,
when in cash, treat his young master to oysters after
the play, and to a glass of rum-shrub for a night-cap.
We may be pretty certain that Mr. Rowson profited in
his turn by his young master's liberality and gratitude
for the pleasures to which the footman inducted him.

A famous tailor from the West End of the town--
Mr. Osborne would have none of your City or Holborn
bunglers, he said, for the boy (though a City tailor was
good enough for HIM)--was summoned to ornament little
George's person, and was told to spare no expense in so
doing.  So, Mr. Woolsey, of Conduit Street, gave a loose
to his imagination and sent the child home fancy trousers,
fancy waistcoats, and fancy jackets enough to furnish a
school of little dandies.  Georgy had little white
waistcoats for evening parties, and little cut velvet waistcoats
for dinners, and a dear little darling shawl dressing-gown,
for all the world like a little man.  He dressed for dinner
every day, "like a regular West End swell," as his
grandfather remarked; one of the domestics was affected to
his special service, attended him at his toilette,
answered his bell, and brought him his letters always on a
silver tray.

Georgy, after breakfast, would sit in the arm-chair in
the dining-room and read the Morning Post, just like a
grown-up man.  "How he DU dam and swear," the
servants would cry, delighted at his precocity.  Those who
remembered the Captain his father, declared Master
George was his Pa, every inch of him.  He made the house
lively by his activity, his imperiousness, his scolding, and
his good-nature.

George's education was confided to a neighbouring
scholar and private pedagogue who "prepared young
noblemen and gentlemen for the Universities, the senate,
and the learned professions:  whose system did not
embrace the degrading corporal severities still practised at
the ancient places of education, and in whose family the
pupils would find the elegances of refined society and
the confidence and affection of a home." It was in this
way that the Reverend Lawrence Veal of Hart Street,
Bloomsbury, and domestic Chaplain to the Earl of
Bareacres, strove with Mrs. Veal his wife to entice pupils.

By thus advertising and pushing sedulously, the
domestic Chaplain and his Lady generally succeeded in
having one or two scholars by them--who paid a high
figure and were thought to be in uncommonly comfortable
quarters.  There was a large West Indian, whom
nobody came to see, with a mahogany complexion, a woolly
head, and an exceedingly dandyfied appearance; there
was another hulking boy of three-and-twenty whose
education had been neglected and whom Mr. and Mrs. Veal
were to introduce into the polite world; there were two
sons of Colonel Bangles of the East India Company's
Service:  these four sat down to dinner at Mrs. Veal's
genteel board, when Georgy was introduced to her
establishment.

Georgy was, like some dozen other pupils, only a
day boy; he arrived in the morning under the
guardianship of his friend Mr. Rowson, and if it was fine,
would ride away in the afternoon on his pony, followed by
the groom.  The wealth of his grandfather was reported
in the school to be prodigious.  The Rev.  Mr. Veal used
to compliment Georgy upon it personally, warning him
that he was destined for a high station; that it became
him to prepare, by sedulity and docility in youth, for the
lofty duties to which he would be called in mature age;
that obedience in the child was the best preparation for
command in the man; and that he therefore begged George
would not bring toffee into the school and ruin the health
of the Masters Bangles, who had everything they wanted
at the elegant and abundant table of Mrs. Veal.

With respect to learning, "the Curriculum," as Mr.
Veal loved to call it, was of prodigious extent, and the
young gentlemen in Hart Street might learn a
something of every known science.  The Rev.  Mr. Veal had
an orrery, an electrifying machine, a turning lathe, a
theatre (in the wash-house), a chemical apparatus, and
what he called a select library of all the works of the
best authors of ancient and modern times and languages.
He took the boys to the British Museum and descanted
upon the antiquities and the specimens of natural history
there, so that audiences would gather round him as he
spoke, and all Bloomsbury highly admired him as a
prodigiously well-informed man.  And whenever he spoke
(which he did almost always), he took care to produce the
very finest and longest words of which the vocabulary
gave him the use, rightly judging that it was as cheap to
employ a handsome, large, and sonorous epithet, as to
use a little stingy one.

Thus he would say to George in school, "I observed
on my return home from taking the indulgence of an
evening's scientific conversation with my excellent friend
Doctor Bulders--a true archaeologian, gentlemen, a true
archaeologian--that the windows of your venerated
grandfather's almost princely mansion in Russell Square were
illuminated as if for the purposes of festivity.  Am I right
in my conjecture that Mr. Osborne entertained a society
of chosen spirits round his sumptuous board last night?"

Little Georgy, who had considerable humour, and used
to mimic Mr. Veal to his face with great spirit and
dexterity, would reply that Mr. V.  was quite correct
in his surmise.

"Then those friends who had the honour of partaking
of Mr. Osborne's hospitality, gentlemen, had no reason,
I will lay any wager, to complain of their repast.  I
myself have been more than once so favoured.  (By the way,
Master Osborne, you came a little late this morning, and
have been a defaulter in this respect more than once.)
I myself, I say, gentlemen, humble as I am, have been
found not unworthy to share Mr. Osborne's elegant
hospitality.  And though I have feasted with the great and
noble of the world--for I presume that I may call my
excellent friend and patron, the Right Honourable George
Earl of Bareacres, one of the number--yet I assure you
that the board of the British merchant was to the full
as richly served, and his reception as gratifying and
noble.  Mr. Bluck, sir, we will resume, if you please,
that passage of Eutropis, which was interrupted by the
late arrival of Master Osborne."

To this great man George's education was for some
time entrusted.  Amelia was bewildered by his phrases,
but thought him a prodigy of learning.  That poor widow
made friends of Mrs. Veal, for reasons of her own.  She
liked to be in the house and see Georgy coming to school
there.  She liked to be asked to Mrs. Veal's conversazioni,
which took place once a month (as you were informed on
pink cards, with AOHNH engraved on them), and where
the professor welcomed his pupils and their friends to weak
tea and scientific conversation.  Poor little Amelia never
missed one of these entertainments and thought them
delicious so long as she might have Georgy sitting by her.
And she would walk from Brompton in any weather,
and embrace Mrs. Veal with tearful gratitude for the
delightful evening she had passed, when, the company
having retired and Georgy gone off with Mr. Rowson, his
attendant, poor Mrs. Osborne put on her cloaks and
her shawls preparatory to walking home.

As for the learning which Georgy imbibed under this
valuable master of a hundred sciences, to judge from
the weekly reports which the lad took home to his
grandfather, his progress was remarkable.  The names of a
score or more of desirable branches of knowledge were
printed in a table, and the pupil's progress in each was
marked by the professor.  In Greek Georgy was
pronounced aristos, in Latin optimus, in French tres bien,
and so forth; and everybody had prizes for everything
at the end of the year.  Even Mr. Swartz, the wooly-
headed young gentleman, and half-brother to the
Honourable Mrs. Mac Mull, and Mr. Bluck, the neglected
young pupil of three-and-twenty from the agricultural
district, and that idle young scapegrace of a Master Todd
before mentioned, received little eighteen-penny books,
with "Athene" engraved on them, and a pompous Latin
inscription from the professor to his young friends.

The family of this Master Todd were hangers-on of
the house of Osborne.  The old gentleman had advanced
Todd from being a clerk to be a junior partner in his
establishment.

Mr. Osborne was the godfather of young Master Todd
(who in subsequent life wrote Mr. Osborne Todd on his
cards and became a man of decided fashion), while Miss
Osborne had accompanied Miss Maria Todd to the font,
and gave her protegee a prayer-book, a collection of
tracts, a volume of very low church poetry, or some
such memento of her goodness every year.  Miss O.  drove
the Todds out in her carriage now and then; when they
were ill, her footman, in large plush smalls and
waistcoat, brought jellies and delicacies from Russell Square to
Coram Street.  Coram Street trembled and looked up to
Russell Square indeed, and Mrs. Todd, who had a pretty
hand at cutting out paper trimmings for haunches of
mutton, and could make flowers, ducks, &c., out of turnips
and carrots in a very creditable manner, would go to "the
Square," as it was called, and assist in the preparations
incident to a great dinner, without even so much as
thinking of sitting down to the banquet.  If any guest failed at
the eleventh hour, Todd was asked to dine.  Mrs. Todd and
Maria came across in the evening, slipped in with a muffled
knock, and were in the drawing-room by the time Miss
Osborne and the ladies under her convoy reached that
apartment--and ready to fire off duets and sing until
the gentlemen came up.  Poor Maria Todd; poor young
lady!  How she had to work and thrum at these duets
and sonatas in the Street, before they appeared in public
in the Square!

Thus it seemed to be decreed by fate that Georgy
was to domineer over everybody with whom he came in
contact, and that friends, relatives, and domestics were
all to bow the knee before the little fellow.  It must
be owned that he accommodated himself very willingly
to this arrangement.  Most people do so.  And Georgy
liked to play the part of master and perhaps had a
natural aptitude for it.

In Russell Square everybody was afraid of Mr. Osborne,
and Mr. Osborne was afraid of Georgy.  The boy's
dashing manners, and offhand rattle about books and
learning, his likeness to his father (dead unreconciled in
Brussels yonder) awed the old gentleman and gave the
young boy the mastery.  The old man would start at
some hereditary feature or tone unconsciously used by
the little lad, and fancy that George's father was again
before him.  He tried by indulgence to the grandson to
make up for harshness to the elder George.  People were
surprised at his gentleness to the boy.  He growled and
swore at Miss Osborne as usual, and would smile when
George came down late for breakfast.

Miss Osborne, George's aunt, was a faded old spinster,
broken down by more than forty years of dulness and
coarse usage.  It was easy for a lad of spirit to master her.
And whenever George wanted anything from her, from the
jam-pots in her cupboards to the cracked and dry old
colours in her paint-box (the old paint-box which she
had had when she was a pupil of Mr. Smee and was
still almost young and blooming), Georgy took possession
of the object of his desire, which obtained, he took no
further notice of his aunt.

For his friends and cronies, he had a pompous old
schoolmaster, who flattered him, and a toady, his senior,
whom he could thrash.  It was dear Mrs. Todd's delight to
leave him with her youngest daughter, Rosa Jemima, a
darling child of eight years old.  The little pair looked so
well together, she would say (but not to the folks in "the
Square," we may be sure) "who knows what might
happen? Don't they make a pretty little couple?" the
fond mother thought.

The broken-spirited, old, maternal grandfather was
likewise subject to the little tyrant.  He could not help
respecting a lad who had such fine clothes and rode with
a groom behind him.  Georgy, on his side, was in the
constant habit of hearing coarse abuse and vulgar satire
levelled at John Sedley by his pitiless old enemy, Mr.
Osborne.  Osborne used to call the other the old pauper,
the old coal-man, the old bankrupt, and by many other
such names of brutal contumely.  How was little George
to respect a man so prostrate? A few months after he
was with his paternal grandfather, Mrs. Sedley died.
There had been little love between her and the child.
He did not care to show much grief.  He came down to
visit his mother in a fine new suit of mourning, and was
very angry that he could not go to a play upon which
he had set his heart.

The illness of that old lady had been the occupation
and perhaps the safeguard of Amelia.  What do men know
about women's martyrdoms? We should go mad had
we to endure the hundredth part of those daily pains
which are meekly borne by many women.  Ceaseless
slavery meeting with no reward; constant gentleness and
kindness met by cruelty as constant; love, labour, patience,
watchfulness, without even so much as the acknowledgement
of a good word; all this, how many of them have
to bear in quiet, and appear abroad with cheerful faces
as if they felt nothing.  Tender slaves that they are, they
must needs be hypocrites and weak.

From her chair Amelia's mother had taken to her bed,
which she had never left, and from which Mrs. Osborne
herself was never absent except when she ran to see
George.  The old lady grudged her even those rare visits;
she, who had been a kind, smiling, good-natured mother
once, in the days of her prosperity, but whom poverty
and infirmities had broken down.  Her illness or estrangement
did not affect Amelia.  They rather enabled her to
support the other calamity under which she was suffering,
and from the thoughts of which she was kept by the
ceaseless calls of the invalid.  Amelia bore her harshness
quite gently; smoothed the uneasy pillow; was always
ready with a soft answer to the watchful, querulous
voice; soothed the sufferer with words of hope, such as
her pious simple heart could best feel and utter, and
closed the eyes that had once looked so tenderly upon
her.

Then all her time and tenderness were devoted to the
consolation and comfort of the bereaved old father, who
was stunned by the blow which had befallen him, and
stood utterly alone in the world.  His wife, his honour,
his fortune, everything he loved best had fallen away
from him.  There was only Amelia to stand by and support
with her gentle arms the tottering, heart-broken old man.
We are not going to write the history:  it would be too
dreary and stupid.  I can see Vanity Fair yawning over it
d'avance.

One day as the young gentlemen were assembled
in the study at the Rev.  Mr. Veal's, and the domestic
chaplain to the Right Honourable the Earl of Bareacres
was spouting away as usual, a smart carriage drove up
to the door decorated with the statue of Athene, and two
gentlemen stepped out.  The young Masters Bangles rushed
to the window with a vague notion that their father
might have arrived from Bombay.  The great hulking
scholar of three-and-twenty, who was crying secretly over a
passage of Eutropius, flattened his neglected nose against
the panes and looked at the drag, as the laquais de place
sprang from the box and let out the persons in the carriage.

"It's a fat one and a thin one," Mr. Bluck said as a
thundering knock came to the door.

Everybody was interested, from the domestic chaplain
himself, who hoped he saw the fathers of some future
pupils, down to Master Georgy, glad of any pretext for
laying his book down.

The boy in the shabby livery with the faded copper
buttons, who always thrust himself into the tight coat
to open the door, came into the study and said, "Two
gentlemen want to see Master Osborne." The professor
had had a trifling altercation in the morning with that
young gentleman, owing to a difference about the
introduction of crackers in school-time; but his face
resumed its habitual expression of bland courtesy as he
said, "Master Osborne, I give you full permission to go
and see your carriage friends--to whom I beg you to
convey the respectful compliments of myself and Mrs.
Veal."

Georgy went into the reception-room and saw two
strangers, whom he looked at with his head up, in his
usual haughty manner.  One was fat, with mustachios,
and the other was lean and long, in a blue frock-coat,
with a brown face and a grizzled head.

"My God, how like he is!" said the long gentleman
with a start.  "Can you guess who we are, George?"

The boy's face flushed up, as it did usually when he
was moved, and his eyes brightened.  "I don't know the
other," he said, "but I should think you must be Major
Dobbin."

Indeed it was our old friend.  His voice trembled
with pleasure as he greeted the boy, and taking both the
other's hands in his own, drew the lad to him.

"Your mother has talked to you about me--has
she?" he said.

"That she has," Georgy answered, "hundreds and
hundreds of times."




CHAPTER LVII


Eothen

It was one of the many causes for personal pride
with which old Osborne chose to recreate himself
that Sedley, his ancient rival, enemy, and benefactor,
was in his last days so utterly defeated and humiliated
as to be forced to accept pecuniary obligations at the
hands of the man who had most injured and insulted
him.  The successful man of the world cursed the old
pauper and relieved him from time to time.  As he
furnished George with money for his mother, he gave
the boy to understand by hints, delivered in his brutal,
coarse way, that George's maternal grandfather was
but a wretched old bankrupt and dependant, and that
John Sedley might thank the man to whom he already
owed ever so much money for the aid which his generosity
now chose to administer.  George carried the pompous
supplies to his mother and the shattered old widower whom
it was now the main business of her life to tend and
comfort.  The little fellow patronized the feeble and
disappointed old man.

It may have shown a want of "proper pride" in
Amelia that she chose to accept these money benefits at
the hands of her father's enemy.  But proper pride and
this poor lady had never had much acquaintance together.
A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection;
a long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations,
and hard words, of kind offices and no returns, had been
her lot ever since womanhood almost, or since her
luckless marriage with George Osborne.  You who see your
betters bearing up under this shame every day, meekly
suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied,
poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever
step down from your prosperity and wash the feet of
these poor wearied beggars? The very thought of them is
odious and low.  "There must be classes--there must be
rich and poor," Dives says, smacking his claret (it is
well if he even sends the broken meat out to Lazarus
sitting under the window).  Very true; but think how
mysterious and often unaccountable it is--that lottery
of life which gives to this man the purple and fine linen
and sends to the other rags for garments and dogs for
comforters.

So I must own that, without much repining, on the
contrary with something akin to gratitude, Amelia took the
crumbs that her father-in-law let drop now and then,
and with them fed her own parent.  Directly she understood
it to be her duty, it was this young woman's nature
(ladies, she is but thirty still, and we choose to call her
a young woman even at that age) it was, I say, her
nature to sacrifice herself and to fling all that she had at
the feet of the beloved object.  During what long thankless
nights had she worked out her fingers for little Georgy
whilst at home with her; what buffets, scorns, privations,
poverties had she endured for father and mother!  And
in the midst of all these solitary resignations and unseen
sacrifices, she did not respect herself any more than the
world respected her, but I believe thought in her heart
that she was a poor-spirited, despicable little creature,
whose luck in life was only too good for her merits.  O
you poor women!  O you poor secret martyrs and victims,
whose life is a torture, who are stretched on racks in
your bedrooms, and who lay your heads down on the
block daily at the drawing-room table; every man who
watches your pains, or peers into those dark places where
the torture is administered to you, must pity you--and
--and thank God that he has a beard.  I recollect seeing,
years ago, at the prisons for idiots and madmen at
Bicetre, near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under
the bondage of his imprisonment and his personal
infirmity, to whom one of our party gave a halfpenny worth
of snuff in a cornet or "screw" of paper.  The kindness
was too much for the poor epileptic creature.  He cried
in an anguish of delight and gratitude:  if anybody gave
you and me a thousand a year, or saved our lives, we
could not be so affected.  And so, if you properly tyrannize
over a woman, you will find a h'p'orth of kindness act
upon her and bring tears into her eyes, as though you
were an angel benefiting her.

Some such boons as these were the best which Fortune
allotted to poor little Amelia.  Her life, begun not
unprosperously, had come down to this--to a mean prison
and a long, ignoble bondage.  Little George visited her
captivity sometimes and consoled it with feeble gleams
of encouragement.  Russell Square was the boundary of
her prison:  she might walk thither occasionally, but was
always back to sleep in her cell at night; to perform
cheerless duties; to watch by thankless sick-beds; to
suffer the harassment and tyranny of querulous
disappointed old age.  How many thousands of people are
there, women for the most part, who are doomed to endure
this long slavery?--who are hospital nurses without
wages--sisters of Charity, if you like, without the
romance and the sentiment of sacrifice--who strive, fast,
watch, and suffer, unpitied, and fade away ignobly and
unknown.

The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the
destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast
down the tender, good, and wise, and to set up the selfish,
the foolish, or the wicked.  Oh, be humble, my brother,
in your prosperity!  Be gentle with those who are less
lucky, if not more deserving.  Think, what right have you
to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation,
whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be
an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity is very likely
a satire.

They buried Amelia's mother in the churchyard at
Brompton, upon just such a rainy, dark day as Amelia
recollected when first she had been there to marry George.
Her little boy sat by her side in pompous new sables.
She remembered the old pew-woman and clerk.  Her
thoughts were away in other times as the parson read.
But that she held George's hand in her own, perhaps she
would have liked to change places with....  Then, as
usual, she felt ashamed of her selfish thoughts and prayed
inwardly to be strengthened to do her duty.

So she determined with all her might and strength to
try and make her old father happy.  She slaved, toiled,
patched, and mended, sang and played backgammon, read
out the newspaper, cooked dishes, for old Sedley, walked
him out sedulously into Kensington Gardens or the Brompton
Lanes, listened to his stories with untiring smiles and
affectionate hypocrisy, or sat musing by his side and
communing with her own thoughts and reminiscences,
as the old man, feeble and querulous, sunned himself on
the garden benches and prattled about his wrongs or his
sorrows.  What sad, unsatisfactory thoughts those of the
widow were!  The children running up and down the
slopes and broad paths in the gardens reminded her of
George, who was taken from her; the first George was
taken from her; her selfish, guilty love, in both instances,
had been rebuked and bitterly chastised.  She strove to
think it was right that she should be so punished.  She
was such a miserable wicked sinner.  She was quite
alone in the world.

I know that the account of this kind of solitary
imprisonment is insufferably tedious, unless there is some
cheerful or humorous incident to enliven it--a tender gaoler,
for instance, or a waggish commandant of the fortress,
or a mouse to come out and play about Latude's beard
and whiskers, or a subterranean passage under the castle,
dug by Trenck with his nails and a toothpick:  the historian
has no such enlivening incident to relate in the narrative
of Amelia's captivity.  Fancy her, if you please, during this
period, very sad, but always ready to smile when spoken
to; in a very mean, poor, not to say vulgar position of
life; singing songs, making puddings, playing cards,
mending stockings, for her old father's benefit.  So, never
mind, whether she be a heroine or no; or you and I, however
old, scolding, and bankrupt--may we have in our last days
a kind soft shoulder on which to lean and a gentle hand
to soothe our gouty old pillows.

Old Sedley grew very fond of his daughter after his
wife's death, and Amelia had her consolation in doing her
duty by the old man.

But we are not going to leave these two people long in
such a low and ungenteel station of life.  Better days, as
far as worldly prosperity went, were in store for both.
Perhaps the ingenious reader has guessed who was the
stout gentleman who called upon Georgy at his school in
company with our old friend Major Dobbin.  It was
another old acquaintance returned to England, and at a time
when his presence was likely to be of great comfort to
his relatives there.

Major Dobbin having easily succeeded in getting leave
from his good-natured commandant to proceed to
Madras, and thence probably to Europe, on urgent private
affairs, never ceased travelling night and day until he
reached his journey's end, and had directed his march
with such celerity that he arrived at Madras in a high
fever.  His servants who accompanied him brought him
to the house of the friend with whom he had resolved to
stay until his departure for Europe in a state of delirium;
and it was thought for many, many days that he would
never travel farther than the burying-ground of the church
of St.  George's, where the troops should fire a salvo over
his grave, and where many a gallant officer lies far away
from his home.

Here, as the poor fellow lay tossing in his fever, the
people who watched him might have heard him raving
about Amelia.  The idea that he should never see her again
depressed him in his lucid hours.  He thought his last day
was come, and he made his solemn preparations for
departure, setting his affairs in this world in order and
leaving the little property of which he was possessed to
those whom he most desired to benefit.  The friend in
whose house he was located witnessed his testament.  He
desired to be buried with a little brown hair-chain which
he wore round his neck and which, if the truth must be
known, he had got from Amelia's maid at Brussels, when
the young widow's hair was cut off, during the fever
which prostrated her after the death of George Osborne
on the plateau at Mount St.  John.

He recovered, rallied, relapsed again, having undergone
such a process of blood-letting and calomel as
showed the strength of his original constitution.  He was
almost a skeleton when they put him on board the
Ramchunder East Indiaman, Captain Bragg, from Calcutta,
touching at Madras, and so weak and prostrate that his
friend who had tended him through his illness prophesied
that the honest Major would never survive the voyage,
and that he would pass some morning, shrouded in
flag and hammock, over the ship's side, and carrying
down to the sea with him the relic that he wore at his
heart.  But whether it was the sea air, or the hope which
sprung up in him afresh, from the day that the ship
spread her canvas and stood out of the roads towards
home, our friend began to amend, and he was quite
well (though as gaunt as a greyhound) before they
reached the Cape.  "Kirk will be disappointed of his
majority this time," he said with a smile; "he will
expect to find himself gazetted by the time the regiment
reaches home." For it must be premised that while the
Major was lying ill at Madras, having made such
prodigious haste to go thither, the gallant --th, which had
passed many years abroad, which after its return from
the West Indies had been baulked of its stay at home by
the Waterloo campaign, and had been ordered from
Flanders to India, had received orders home; and the Major
might have accompanied his comrades, had he chosen to
wait for their arrival at Madras.

Perhaps he was not inclined to put himself in his
exhausted state again under the guardianship of Glorvina.
"I think Miss O'Dowd would have done for me," he said
laughingly to a fellow-passenger, "if we had had her on
board, and when she had sunk me, she would have fallen
upon you, depend upon it, and carried you in as a prize
to Southampton, Jos, my boy."

For indeed it was no other than our stout friend
who was also a passenger on board the Ramchunder.  He
had passed ten years in Bengal.  Constant dinners, tiffins,
pale ale and claret, the prodigious labour of cutcherry,
and the refreshment of brandy-pawnee which he was
forced to take there, had their effect upon Waterloo Sedley.
A voyage to Europe was pronounced necessary for him--
and having served his full time in India and had fine
appointments which had enabled him to lay by a considerable
sum of money, he was free to come home and stay
with a good pension, or to return and resume that rank
in the service to which his seniority and his vast talents
entitled him.

He was rather thinner than when we last saw him,
but had gained in majesty and solemnity of demeanour.
He had resumed the mustachios to which his services at
Waterloo entitled him, and swaggered about on deck in a
magnificent velvet cap with a gold band and a profuse
ornamentation of pins and jewellery about his person.
He took breakfast in his cabin and dressed as solemnly to
appear on the quarter-deck as if he were going to turn out
for Bond Street, or the Course at Calcutta.  He brought a
native servant with him, who was his valet and