"Come down and see my place, Sheldon," this gentleman had said. "I don't pretend to do the swell thing; but I force my own pines and grow my own grapes, and can put as good a dessert on my table as you could buy in Covent Garden for a five-pun' note. That's my missus's fad, that is, and I can afford it; so why shouldn't I do it? You come and eat your Christmas dinner with us, Sheldon. I've got a friend coming that can sing as good a song as Reeves hisself, and might make a fortune, if he wasn't above coming out at one of them music-halls. And I'll give you a bottle of Madeira that you won't match at any nobleman's table, if noblemen's tables was in your line of business, which you and I know they ain't, old fellow." And then the jolly good fellow dug his fat fingers into George Sheldon's ribs, and George accepted the invitation; not with any elation of spirits, but sufficiently pleased to secure a good dinner with a man who promised to be a profitable client, and whose house was within a reasonable cab-fare from the west-central district. "The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now," thought Mr. Sheldon; "but I don't think they'll try it on with me. And if they do, there's the Marylebone stage. I'm not afraid of a five-mile walk." Having accepted this invitation, and thus disposed of his Christmas-day, George Sheldon refrained from the delights of social converse at his tavern on Christmas-eve, and occupied himself with business. His clerk left him at the usual hour; but the master sat, long after dark, writing letters and reading law-papers, while the snow drifted against his windows and whitened the quiet quadrangle below. He had just laid aside his papers and lighted a cigar, when he was startled by a stealthy knocking at his door. He was not unaccustomed to late visitors, as he was known to live at his chambers, and to work after office-hours; but the knocking of to-night was not the loud rollicking rat-a-tat of his jolly-good-fellow friends or clients. If he had been a student of light literature, and imbued with the ghostly associations of the season, he would have gone to his door expecting to behold a weird figure clothed in the vestments of the last century; or an old woman in ruff and martingale, whose figure in the flesh had once haunted those legal precincts; or the ghostly semblance of the Baron of Verulam himself, revisiting the glimpses of the moon and the avenue of elms that were planted by his order. In George Sheldon's nature there was, however, no lurking dread of fiend or phantom. His ideas in connection with ghosts were limited to a white sheet, a broomstick, and a hollow turnip with a lighted candle inside it; and he would have set down the most awful apparition that ever was revealed to German ghost-seer, with a scornful grin, as a member of the sheet and-hollow-turnip confraternity.