altogether. I breathed more freely as I went my way, and reached my agent's house at length, lighter of heart than I had been for hours before. Mr Treherne was a man of business, and a prosperous one too, or surely he had no right to place before the dozen corpulent gentlemen whom I met on my arrival--a dinner, towards which the viscera of princes might have turned without ruffling a fold of their intestinal dignity. I partook of the feast--that is to say, I sat at the groaning table, and, like a cautious and dyspeptic man, I eat roast beef--_toujours_ roast beef, and nothing else--appeased my thirst with grateful claret, and retired at last to wholesome sleep and quiet dreams. Not so the corpulent guests. It may be to my dyspeptic habit, which enables me to be virtuous at a trifling cost, and to nothing loftier, that I am bound to attribute the feeling with which I invariably sit down to feasting; be this the fact or not, I confess that a sense of shame, uneasiness, and dislike, renders an affair of this kind to me the most irksome and unpleasant of enjoyments. The eagerness of appetite that one can fairly see in the watery and sensual eyes of men to whom _eating_ has become the aim and joy of their existence--the absorption of every faculty in the gluttonous pursuit--the animal indulgence and delight--these are sickening; then the deliberate and cold-blooded torture of the creatures whose marrowy bones are _crunched_ by the epicure, without a thought of the suffering that preceded his intensely pleasurable emotions, and the bare mention of which, in this narrative, is almost more than sufficient, then, worst of all, the wilful prodigality and waste--the wickedness of casting to the dogs the healthy food for which whole families, widows, and beggared orphans are pining in the neighbouring street--the guilty indifference of him who finds the wealth for the profusion, and the impudent recklessness of the underling who abuses it. Such are a few of the causes which concur in giving to the finest banquet I have seen an aspect not more odious than humiliating; and here I dwell upon the fact, because the incident which I shall shortly bring before the reader's eye, served to confirm the feelings which I entertain on this subject, and presented an instructive contrast to the splendid entertainment which greeted my immediate arrival.