He holds a telegraphic communion with his inner man that passeth show; he coquets and dallies with his stomach; every indescribable symptom is taken into account, and forms the subject of unexpressed congratulation. “Dear tender flowers of appetite, it would be sacrilege, or worse, to nip ye in the bud, by powdering over you the baneful dew of a glass of Bucellas, or the still more odious blight of a basin of mulligatawny. No, I will coax you, and protect you, and _travel_ for you, in faithful love and kindness, even until ye shall be fully fattened up for slaughter at five o’clock.” When the secure one sits down to table, he painsfully and not unostentatiously (to himself) relieves the one lowest button of his vest from the thrall of button-hole, and with equally deliberate care arranges a napkin over the front of his person. Dinner is a sacred ceremony, and requires its canonicals. Being fully acquainted with the whole planisphere of the table, he takes an exactly proportioned quantity of each article, so as ultimately to have enjoyed each in its exact proportion of merit, and to have precisely enough out of the whole. A secure one is frequently an old respectable unmarried gentleman, residing with a single servant—Jenny—in a “self-contained” house about Stockbridge or Newington. Knowing the distance at which he lives from the mercantile parts of the town, he takes care never to want what he calls a pound of change, as well as a small stock of copper—at least the value of a shilling—observing also that the change is not unmixed with sixpences, so that when any shopkeeper’s boy calls for payment of an account, or to take back the purchase-money of any article he has bought that day in town, he may not have to trouble [_i. e._ trust] the messenger with the duty of obtaining change for a bank note, which would tend to occasion a more than necessary answering of the bells at the door, besides keeping him in an agony of fiddle-faddle till the little affair was settled. Jenny, who has been so long in his service as to have become almost as secure as himself, never opens the door o’ nights without putting on the chain; and she has a standing order against all parleying with beggars, or poor women who sell tapes and such things out of baskets. The secure one regards few creatures in this world with a more jealous or malignant eye than these personages. “Why, Sir, they want nothing but to make an opportunity of stripping the lobby or the kitchen!” And such a story he can tell of a missing hat-brush! “A woman seen that morning going about—sold a pair of garters to the maid-servant three doors off at ten—front door had been left open for a minute, not more, while Jenny ran after me with something I had forgot—and in that time—it could have been at no other—the deed was done. A hat-brush I had just got with my last hat at Grieve and Scott’s; had a thing that screwed in at the one end, so that it was a stretcher also; cost four and sixpence, even taking