About seven o'clock Tag-rag quitted his premises in Oxford Street, for his country house; and, occupied with these and similar delightful and anxious thoughts and speculations, hurried along Oxford Street on his way to the Clapham stage, without thinking of his umbrella, though it rained fast. When he had taken his place on the coach-box, beside old Crack, (as he had done almost every night for years,) he was so unusually silent that Crack naturally thought his best passenger was going to become bankrupt, or compound with his creditors, or do something in that line, shortly. Mr. Tag-rag could hardly keep his temper at the slow pace old Crack was driving at--just when Mr. Tag-rag would have wished to gallop the whole way. Never had he descended with so much briskness, as when the coach at length drew up before the little green gate, which opened on the tidy little gravel walk, which led up to the little green wooden porch, which sheltered the little door which admitted you into little Satin Lodge. As Tag-rag stood for a moment wiping his wet shoes upon the mat, he could not help observing, for the first time, by the inward light of ten thousand a-year, how _uncommon_ narrow the passage was; and thinking that Satin Lodge would never _do_, when he should be the father-in-law of a man worth ten thousand a-year--but he could easily let that house then, and take a large one. As he hung his hat upon the peg, the perilous insolence of Lutestring occurred to him; and he deposited such a prodigious, but half-suppressed execration upon that gentleman's name, as must have sunk a far more buoyant sinner many fathoms deeper than usual into a certain hot and deep place that shall be nameless.