The marvellous labyrinth of closets at the old mansion where you once paid a visit--in a coach--is all dissipated. They have turned out to be the merest cupboards in the wall. Nat, who had travelled and seen London, is by no means so surprising a fellow to your manhood as he was to the boy. He has grown spare, and wears spectacles. He is not so famous as he was. You would hardly think of consulting him now about your marriage, or even about the price of goats upon London Bridge. As for Jenny,--your first, fond flame!--lively, romantic, black-eyed Jenny,--the reader of "Thaddeus of Warsaw,"--who sighed and wore blue ribbons on her bonnet,--who wrote love-notes,--who talked so tenderly of broken hearts,--who used a glass seal with a Cupid and a dart,--dear Jenny!--she is now the plump and thriving wife of the apothecary of the town! She sweeps out every morning at seven the little entry of the apothecary's house; she buys a "joint" twice a week from the butcher, and is particular to have the "knuckle" thrown in for soups; she wears a sky-blue calico gown, and dresses her hair in three little flat quirls on either side of her head, each one pierced through with a two-pronged hair-pin. She does not read "Thaddeus of Warsaw" now. II. _Man of the World._ Few persons live through the first periods of manhood without strong temptations to be counted "men of the world." The idea looms grandly among those vanities that hedge a man's approach to maturity. Clarence is in good training for the acceptance of this idea. The broken hope, which clouded his closing youth, shoots over its influence upon the dawn of manhood. Mortified pride had taught--as it always teaches--not caution only, but doubt, distrust, indifference. A new pride grows up on the ruins of the old, weak, and vain pride of youth. Then it was a pride of learning, or of affection; now it is a pride of indifference. Then the world proved bleak and cold, as contrasted with his shining dreams; and now he accepts the proof, and wins from it what he can. The man of the world puts on the method and measure of the world: he studies its humors. He gives up the boyish notion of a sincerity among men like that of youth: he lives to seem. He conquers such annoyances as the world may thrust upon him, in the shape of grief or losses, like a practical athlete of the ring. He studies moral sparring. With somewhat of this strange vanity growing on you, you do not suffer the heart to wake into life except in such fanciful dreams as tempt you back to the sunny slopes of childhood.