“There’s Beaumont,” the irate junior partner thus unburthened himself, “doing the la-di-da in baronial halls, whilst I’m expected to moil and toil trying to find work for a set of idle clerks in the deadest season of the legal year. How Beaumont, with the principles he professes can cheek to make himself so very much at home, as I’m sure from his letters he has done, in _gremio ecclesiae_, in the very bosom of the Church, or, what is more scandalous still, of the Church’s daughter, passes my comprehension. But I suppose Beaumont’s not such a fool as a fellow’d take him to be by his talk. These Radicals are all alike. They rail against aristocrats, but give me a Radical for kow-towing to a duke; they gibe at the Church as by law established, but trust ’em to be uncommon deferential to a bishop; they declaim against pensions and annuities, but wouldn’t they just like a soft job themselves. Oh, no, I don’t think. There’s Beaumont, whose grandfather, I verily believe, used to wear clogs and a blue smock, and take his twopenny-ha’penny pieces to market on a donkey’s back, quaffing the vintages of Burgundy in the baronial halls aforesaid, whilst I, forsooth, whose father was a——” “Was a what?” queried the fair damsel to whom Master Sam had opened the floodgates of his eloquence. “Well, he wasn’t a damned poverty-knocker anyway,” said Charles hurriedly; “whilst I, as I was saying, must content myself with a tankard of bitter in a——” “In a what, sir?” asked the lady, tartly. “In a place that I much refer to baronial halls,” quoth Sam gallantly. The place so honoured was the snug of the Royal Albert in Huddersfield, and the lady to whom Mr. Storth was confiding his grievances was Miss Amelia Wrigley, the very comely daughter of the landlord of that old-established hostelry, a lady not only well-dowered by Nature with a good figure, a pleasing face, and a sprightly wit, but reputed to be likely in the years to come to be well-dowered by the worthy but gouty sire, whose ales and liquors Mr. Storth so vastly appreciated.