were changed. Professionally he was a barrister in the Temple. I was simply an attorney in Essex Street. He had been decidedly successful. I had been decidedly less fortunate. Socially, I think I may be permitted to say, that he was a swell. He was the neatest hand at tying a white neckcloth I ever saw; he wore exquisite gloves, and boots of exceeding varnish; he could sing light tenor songs (his F was a comfortable and melodious note, his G certainly more hazardous and less harmonic); he could play (a little) on the flageolet; his hair curled naturally, and his amber whiskers were so luxuriously pendent, that I sometimes wondered he was not rebuked by the Bench for excess of hirsuteness on their account. Of myself it behoves me to speak with reserve; but I will admit that I don’t count myself a great drawing-room triumph. I never could tie a white neckerchief. I am uneasy in lacquered boots. I have no ear for music; my hair does not curl, and my whiskers are of rather a common-place pattern. Of old, I used to patronise him, and considered I had done rather a generous thing when I admitted a junior boy to terms of equal friendship. Now, however, I had begun to fancy that he had lately been rather patting me on the head. He had gone past me in a number of ways; and now he was going to be married before me. Ned Ward had beaten me, in fact. I did not like owning it; yet I felt it to be true, and, somehow, the feeling grated a little on my self-conceit.
It was a dull November afternoon, and though the clock of St. Clement Danes had only just struck three, it was so dark and foggy that the office candles—massive dips, with a tendency to gutter, and otherwise conduct themselves disagreeably—were already lighted. I had as yet no staff of clerks, to be partitioned out into Chancery, Conveyancing, and Common Law sections. The office boy, Mason, who bore the courtesy title of “Mr.” Mason—and whose supposed occupation it was to be “generally useful,” a mission which he construed into getting into complicated dilemmas with the ink-bottles, and being a perpetual obstruction in all business matters with which he was entrusted—had been sent round to Crown Office Row with my letter to little Ned Ward. I was just considering whether there was really any more work to be done that required me to adhere to routine office hours, or whether I might not just as well walk down the Strand to St. James’s Park and back, by way of getting myself into a better humour and improving my appetite for my friend’s dinner, when entered my room my other clerk, Mr. Beale, and presented me with a card, informing me that the gentleman whose name it bore desired very much to see me. “Captain Brigham, R.N.” Could he be a new client! But I had no time for reflection. I raised the shades of my candlesticks, to distribute the light more generally about the room, and became conscious of the presence of a tall, stout, elderly gentleman, with a flaxen wig and gold spectacles. I begged him to be seated. He bowed politely, placed an ebony walking-stick heavily mounted with silver and decked with copious black silk tassels on the table beside him, and a very shiny hat with a vivid white lining on the floor, and then calmly seated himself facing me at my desk. Without speaking, he drew off his black kid gloves and dropped each into his hat. He produced a heavy gold snuff-box, and solaced himself with no stinted pinch. He waved away all stray grains of snuff with a large red and green silk handkerchief, and then addressed me.
“My name is Brigham, as you see by my card,—Captain Brigham, Royal Navy. I have come to you on a matter of business. Do you take snuff? No? Quite right—bad habit—wish I could leave it off. I have been recommended to come to you, and place myself entirely in your hands. No matter who gave me that advice. I intend to follow it. You will give me your assistance?”
I assured him that I should be happy to aid him, as far as lay in my power.
“You’re very kind. Quite the answer I expected: I may say quite. Are you alone here? May I speak to you in confidence—in perfect confidence?”
For his satisfaction, I rose to see that the door leading into the clerk’s office was securely closed.
He resumed.
“I am placed, sir, at this present moment, in a position of extreme pain.”
He drew himself nearer to the fire.
“Few men, sir, can venture to say that they are suffering as I am.”
He put his feet on the fender, and rubbed his plump white hands blandly together.
“I can assure you, sir, I have not brought myself to open this business to you without the most intense deliberation.”
He arranged his flaxen wig in a calm, careful way, pulling it down tightly over his ears.
He made five distinct Gothic arches by joining his hands, very careful that the crowns of the arches, represented by the tops of his fingers, should meet and fit in a thoroughly workmanlike manner; and through the vista thus established contemplated steadily his feet on the fender. He appeared to me quite an ideal old gentleman, dined, and at peace with all the world. He resumed:
“It is a very common saying, sir, that there is a skeleton in every house. The saying may be utterly false in regard to many houses; it is enough to say that I feel it to be true in regard to mine. I have a skeleton in my house.”
I could only look attentive and curious: I could only bow acquiescently, and motion him to proceed.
“My daughter, sir, is my skeleton.”
He said it abruptly, with a snap of his snuff-box lid by way of an effective accompaniment.
“Indeed!”
“True, sir, true, painfully true. Here it is, sir, here”—and he touched his forehead two or three times with a fat forefinger, still holding his gold snuff-box in his hand. “I believe a ‘loose slate’ is the vulgar title of the malady she suffers under. Her mother was a poor creature, very weak and frail. Dead, sir, dead, many years. Still I could hardly assert that the ‘loose slate’ was fully developed in her case. But the state of