"No, it is not so," said Mr. Aubrey, with a sigh, as he walked on--Gammon keeping easily beside him--"I have been profoundly affected by scenes which I have witnessed in the immediate neighborhood of your office, since quitting it; what misery! what horror!" "Ah, Mr. Aubrey!"--exclaimed Gammon, echoing the sigh of his companion, as they slowly ascended Holborn Hill, separate, but side by side--"what a checkered scene is life! Guilt and innocence--happiness and misery--wealth and poverty--disease and health--wisdom and folly--sensuality and refinement--piety and irreligion--how strangely intermingled we behold them, wherever we look on life--and how difficult, to the philosopher, to detect the principle"---- "Difficult?--Impossible! Impossible! God alone can do so!"--exclaimed Mr. Aubrey, thoughtfully. "Comparison, I have often thought," said Gammon, after a pause--"of one's own troubles with the greater misfortunes endured by others, is beneficial or prejudicial--consolatory or disheartening--according as the mind of him who makes the comparison is well or ill regulated--possessed or destitute, of moral and religious principle!" "It is so, indeed," said Mr. Aubrey. Though not particularly inclined to enter into or prolong conversation, he was pleased with the tone of his companion's remark. "As for me," proceeded Gammon, with a slight sigh--"the absorbing anxieties of professional life; and, too, in a line of professional life which, infinitely to my distaste, brings me constantly into scenes such as you have been observing, have contributed to render me, I fear, less sensible of their real character; yet can I vividly conceive the effect they must, when first seen, produce upon the mind and heart of a compassionate, an observant, a reflecting man, Mr. Aubrey!" Gammon looked a gentleman; his address was easy and insinuating, full of delicate deference, without the slightest tendency to cant or sycophancy; his countenance was an intellectual and expressive one; his conversation that of an educated and thinking man. He was striving his utmost to produce a favorable impression on Mr. Aubrey; and, as is very little to be wondered at, he succeeded. By the time that they had got about twenty yards beyond Fetter Lane, they might have been seen walking together, arm-in-arm. As they approached Oxford Street, they suddenly encountered Mr. Runnington. "God bless me, Mr. Aubrey!" said he, surprisedly--"and Mr. Gammon? How do you do, Mr. Gammon?"--he continued, taking off his hat with a little formality, and speaking in a corresponding tone; but he was encountered by Gammon with greatly superior ease and distance, and was not a little nettled at it; for he was so palpably foiled with his own weapons.