66

What Name did you say?"

329

more than three hours ago. I wish you would look for Blank,- 500 Queen Street, thirty shillings, a parchment." Pretending to feel in one or two pigeon-holes, he replied, "Not come," and went on wearily calling out the names of the fresh ships come down with the tide. By this time I had got my elbows over the barrier, and had been trying to catch the fellow's eye for some five or ten minutes. At last he looked up.

"What name did you say?"

Blank, 500 Queen Street, thirty shillings, small parchment," I repeated.

"Ah, yes," said he, and actually looked for it. "Here it is; it's irregular, though. You must take it back to the first office. The date

Now, as I had already got over this hitch, it was hard to begin the whole thing again. However, I ran back with it in haste, for the stream of exhausted clerks was already pouring out fast into the Strand, and I found two or three exquisites just going away.

do

66

Well," said one, testily, "and pray what you want?"

I forget exactly what I said, but I know. that I was very slow, cool, lucid, and, I trust, politely sarcastic.

330

"Call the next Day."

"Waal," replied he,

I certainly it's a

baw."

66

Yaas," said I, "it's a baw;" for, don't you see, I thought if I spoke the language of the natives I might get redress.

Ah, you showed it to one of the gentlemen here?"

"Yaas," said I, pointing out his signature, " and he signed it, and said it was all right." Ah!" he replied, "I suppose he was very much engaged?"

Yaas," said I, "he was doing nothing; and," I added, "there were two other gentlemen helping him." Mind you, we were quite unmoved throughout the dialogue.

Waal," said he, “you must take it back.” Having said this, and scrawled over it with a pencil an assertion that it was all right, he finished buttoning his gloves, and walked off. Then I found out my weary friend at the mouth of the canvas river again, and depositing the unlucky nomination in his hand, received directions to call the next day. “It's too late now," was the answer, "come here to-morrow."

"That I can't,” I replied; "I'm going out of town, and shall not be able to come for a week. Will it be ready in a week?"

66

Yes," said he, sticking it into a pigeonhole, where I firmly believe it is now untouched, while I am sitting in a friend's library a hundred and fifty miles away from town; but when I go back, I intend to take lodgings somewhere near the Strand, and, if possible, see the end of the matter.

Prodigious! as Dominie Sampson said; the deed has been stamped at last. Probably, it took less than a quarter of a minute to do it; but it was done, and my attitude of expectancy and complaint is no longer justifiable. Messrs. Stickfast & Grabfee laughed, through their clerk, when I told them the history of the process, and said that even they never got a deed stamped without having to send twice. But why, we ask, are not stamps sold? Why could not I have bought a thirty-shilling one, and, sticking it on the thing with a lick and a pat, have relieved the expectation of my friend C at once, though it would have lost me three days' sport in the preserves of Somerset House?

( 332 )

SHORT CUTS.

ID you ever know a path across a level field to be straight, when formed by the feet of wayfarers alone? There is the opposite stile which you seek, there is nothing to turn you to the right hand or to the left but your own swerving fancy; and that makes the field-path crooked, invariably. It seems as if no one could walk straight alone, nor indeed correct himself, once for all, when wrong. The moment he becomes conscious of a deviation from the true track, he leaves it again in the other direction. When the object to be reached is obvious, corrections are more frequently repeated. So it comes to pass that the fresh-stamped path over the mould is never straight, but a calendar of successive mistakes. Thus difficult is it to take the shortest cut. None but a ploughman can do so; and he can do little or nothing, except it be after long years of patient experience. Walking the other day for some miles

Through Fields.

333

through fields, in which the track from gate to gate had been marked out by the passengers themselves, and lay always crooked on the ground, I fell into such an entanglement of thought about short cuts that, like as with a tune which you can get rid of only by humming it again and again, I found myself putting some of them on paper when I came home. And if the great excuse for an essay or soliloquy is its power of arousing reflections which the reader accepts as his own, perhaps my familiar reverie may not be uttered without some such effect.

Short cuts let me first beg the privilege of using them now, and whenever I see a fresh thought, make straight for it, though I may risk a blunder, and leave the correct progress of meditation.

Somebody said once that "there was no royal road to geometry," and that neat reproof to a vulgar king has been caught up by so many, that no doubt there is a great principle involved in the saying. The principle is, that money will not buy genius; that the splendour of rank does not necessarily make the brain shine. But the philosopher's rebuke is telling. only on the assumption that regal power is external alone.