mined to put his pride in his pocket, and encounter the weak-eyed one once more.
The weak-eyed one was just in the transition state between a very old page and a very young footman. His precise functions in Mrs. Pintle's household were as indefinite as his age, for his duties extended from cleaning the windows to driving (at a pinch) the brougham. He was engaged in the familiar but necessary duty of cleaning the knives when Johnny called, and as Johnny inadvertently pulled the visitor's bell, the weak-eyed one was under the necessity of exchanging the linen jacket of domestic life for the black coat and worsted epaulette of ceremony, and of making other radical improvements in his personal appearance, before he opened the door. This functionary had, from a great many years' apprenticeship at opening street doors, taught himself to look upon society as divided into two great heads or groups—visitors and servants; and he who was not a visitor, was, from the weak-eyed one's point of view, a servant. He considered that a man's social position was typified by the bell he rang, and as there existed no intermediate bell for the numerous classes of callers who certainly could not aspire to the dignity of being visitors in the ordinary acceptation of the term, and who were equally far from being in the position of domestic servants, he recognised no intermediate class between the honoured drawing-room caller and the boy who brought the servants' beer. Avowedly a servant himself, he was affable, and, in a weak-eyed way, even cheerful, to those who identified themselves with the humbler bell; but he who, without
