About the time when the conversation recorded in the last chapter was going on between his clerks, Mr. Simnel, the Secretary, sat in his official room, signing his name to printed papers, which he took one by one from a large heap at his right hand, and, after signing, dropped at his feet. It was plain that his thoughts were otherwise absorbed; for as the sheets fell from his hand and fluttered to the ground, he never looked after them, but would occasionally pause in his occupation, lay down his pen, nurse his right leg with both hands, and rock himself quietly to and fro. As he moved here and there in the sunlight, you might have perceived that his limbs were long and ungainly; that he had big broad hands with thick corrugated veins, and finger-nails strong, hard, and cut to a point; that he was very bald, and that such fringe of hair as remained was of a dull red; that he had a large sensual face, big projecting brown eyes, thick clumsy nose, full scarlet underlip, heavy jowl, and large massive chin. You could have noticed, too, that, in certain lights, this face was worn and jaded and almost haggard, traversed here and there with deep furrowed lines, marked with crow's-feet and wrinkles and deep indentations. As you gazed, perhaps, all this faded away, the face beamed forth happy, jolly, sensual as ever; but you felt that the wrinkles were there, and that so soon as the flicker passed away, they would be seen again. Not in the discharge of his easy labours at the Tin-Tax Office had Mr. Simnel acquired these lines and wrinkles. The calm direction of that engine of the State had only come upon him of late years, and never had caused him any trouble. But Mr. Simnel had compressed a great many years' experience into forty years of life, and the crow's-feet and indentations were the result of brain-labour, worry, and anxiety. Mr. Simnel's first recollection of any thing found him a little boy, in a skeleton-suit, at the grammar-school of Combcardingham,--a city which every body save the envious inhabitants of its rival Dockborough allowed to be the metropolis of the north. Little Bob Simnel did not know whose son he was, or how his schooling was paid for; all he knew was, that he boarded with an old lady, the widow of a tax-collector, who was very kind to him, and that he soon found out the best thing he could do was to stick to his book. To his book he stuck manfully; walked through all the classes of the grammar-school, one by one, until he became junior boy of the sixth form, until he became senior boy of the sixth form, until the visiting examiner, the Bishop of Latakia, New Zealand, declared that he had the greatest pleasure in naming Mr. Robert Simnel as the gainer of the exhibition of seventy-five pounds a year; and added, as he shook hands with said Robert, that whichever University he might prefer would be honoured by his choice. Young Mr. Simnel, however, did not go to either Oxford or