best customer that had ever come inside their doors. But perhaps I am wronging Mr Spriggins in assuming that he thought the usurper of his rights worthy of a glance at all: and certainly I am anticipating my story. John dined with the old lady; drank her currant wine in preference to her port, ate her seed biscuits, and when Mr Mogg, in pursuance of a message from his mother-in-law, called to renew in his own person the offer to show his relation's distinguished friend, (Mrs Hodgett had hinted her suspicions that John Brown was a nobleman,) he was ready, though rather sleepy, to commence his lionizing. Mr Mogg was exceedingly civil, showed him every thing worth seeing, from the castle to the stocking-frames; and by the time they returned together to supper at the old lady's, they had become very thick indeed. John called the next day and took his leave of both parties, with a promise not to pass through Nottingham without renewing his acquaintance, and that he would not fail to mention to his friend the dean how much he had been gratified by his reception; both which pledges he scrupulously redeemed. Mr Hodgett's indignation was unbounded; if the united powers of vice-chancellor, doctors, proctors, and convocation, could, by rummaging up some old statute, have expelled John Brown for paying a visit to Nottingham, he would have moved the university to strive to effect it. Happily these powers never are united, or there is no saying what they might not do. So John remained a member of the college still. The dean seldom looked at him if he could help it; he tried once the soothing system by praising him at collections, but it only elicited from John a polite enquiry after Mr and Mrs Mogg. What man could do to extricate himself from his unfortunate position, the dean did. He wrote off immediately to his mother, entreating her, by her hopes of his advancement in life, not to allow the name of Hodgett to be any longer contaminated by any touch of linen-drapery. He suggested that she should at once make over the business to her foreman, Spriggins, reserving to herself an interest in the profits, and retire to a small and genteel cottage in the suburbs, where no impertinent intruder could detect the linen-draper's widow. She, worthy old soul, though it did grieve her, no doubt, to part with her shop, in which were centred the interests and associations of so many years, yet would have set fire to it with her own hands, and emigrated to America--though she knew it only as a place where banks always broke, and people never paid their debts--if it could in anyway have furthered his interests whom she loved better than he deserved. She always looked upon him as a gentleman, and did not wonder he wished to be one, though she herself had no manner of taste for becoming a lady.