"I'll take your word, Swift. Give me a pinch of snuff. What, have you endorsed the brief, eh?" The solicitor whispered. "Have you, though? Well, I should have done the same. It will be silk one of these days." "Safe, sir, safe," said the other; and they went out together, just as a cab stopped at the end of the narrow lane, and, looking very thin and old, and dry, but bright and active still, old Michael Ross stepped out; and then, with a very shabby, long old carpet bag in one hand, and a baggy green umbrella, with staghorn handle, in the other, trotted down the incline into the Temple till he reached the staircase, at the foot of which, on one of the door-posts, was painted a column of names. "Hah!" said the old man, smiling, as he set down his bag, and balanced a clumsy pair of glasses on his nose, holding them up with one hand. "This is it. Number nine. Ground floor, Mr Sergeant Towle; Mr Barnard, Q.C. First floor, Mr Ross." "Hah!" he muttered, with a chuckle, "first floor, Mr Ross. I wonder whether he's at home. "No," he ejaculated. "That's wrong. Should be, `I wonder whether he's in court.'" The old man stopped short in the entry, with the door leading to Mr Sergeant Towle's chambers before, and that leading to the chambers of Mr Barnard, Q.C., behind, and drew forth his washed-out and faded red cotton handkerchief. "I wonder whether he'll be glad to see me," he said. "I'm only a shabby-looking old fellow, and I dare say I've brought the smell of the tan-pits with me; and they tell me my son is getting to be quite a famous lawyer--quite the gentleman, too. Ah, it's a great change--a great change. And I didn't tell him I was coming; and p'raps it isn't right to take him so by surprise. He mightn't like it." The old man rubbed his damp fingers on his handkerchief, and looked about him in a troubled, helpless way. "I feel always so mazed-like in this noisy London," he said, weakly; "and if he was hurt about my coming it would about break my heart, that it would." The handkerchief was on its way up to his eyes, where the weak tears were gathering, when there was the sound of voices in the chambers of Mr Sergeant Towle, and, snatching up his bag, the old man trotted, pretty nimbly, up the stone stairs to the first floor, where, upon the pale drab door, there was the legend, "Mr Ross." "Mr Ross," said the old man, chuckling to himself. "Mr Ross. That's my son. God bless him! My son; and I'd have given a hundred golden pounds if my dear old wife had been alive, and could have stood here and seen his name writ large and famous on a door in London town like that." He stood admiring it for some minutes, and then hesitated, as if overcome by the importance of his son; but at last he raised the big umbrella, and tapped gently with the staghorn beak. It was a very modest knock, and it was not answered, so at the end of five minutes he knocked again.