We have already said Tom was fond of the little thing--in fact, it was the only being on earth that had found its way to his heart. Man must love _something_, and Tom Blacke, the attorney’s clerk, who had married for money as if he had been a ruined peer of the realm, cared just as little for his wife as any impoverished nobleman might for the peeress with whom his income was necessarily encumbered; but the more indifferent he was to the mother, the fonder he was of the child; and with all his liking for skittles and vulgar dissipation (the whist and claret of higher circles), he thought it no hardship to spend the rest of the afternoon with an infant that was just beginning to talk. He fully intended, as he had promised, to remain at home till his wife returned, but a drunkard can have no will of his own. When a man gives himself up to strong drink he chooses a mistress who will take no denial, for whom appetite grows too fiercely by what it feeds on, whose beck and call he must be ever ready to obey, for she will punish his neglect by the infliction of such horrors as we may fancy pictured in the imagination of the doomed--till he fly for relief back to the enchantress that has maddened him; and whilst the poison begets thirst as the thirst craves for the poison, the liquid fire poured upon the smouldering flame eats, and saps, and scorches, till it expires in drivelling idiocy, or blazes out in raving, riotous madness. Mr. Blacke was tolerably cheerful up to a certain point, when he arrived at that state which we once heard graphically described by the sergeant of a barrack-guard, on whom the duty had devolved of placing an inebriated warrior in solitary confinement--“Was he drunk, sergeant?” said the orderly officer. “No, sir.” “Was he sober, then?” “No, sir.” “How? neither drunk nor sober! what d’ye mean?” “Well, sir, the man had been drinking, no doubt, _but the liquor was just dying out in him_.”