"Out of this nettle danger, I'll yet pluck the flower _safety_"--said Mr. Gammon to himself, as he sat inside one of the coaches going to Brighton, towards the close of the month of November, being on the morning after the explosion of the Gunpowder and Fresh Water Company. Inextricably involved as he appeared, yet, conscious of his almost boundless internal resources, he did not despair of retrieving himself, and defeating the vindictive measures taken against him. His chambers were besieged by applicants for admission--Titmouse among them; whose senseless pertinacity, overheard by Gammon as he sat within, while his laundress was being daily worried by Titmouse, several times excited Gammon almost up to the point of darting out and splitting open the head of the intruder; old Mr. Quirk also sent daily letters, in a piteous strain, and called besides daily, begging to be reconciled to Gammon; but he sternly turned a deaf ear to all such applications. In order to escape this intolerable persecution, at all events for a while, and in change of scene and air, unpropitious though the weather was, seek to recruit his health and spirits, he had determined upon spending a week at Brighton; telling no one, however, except his old and faithful laundress, his destination; and instructing her to say that he was gone, she believed, into Suffolk, but would certainly return to town within a week. His pale and harassed features showed how much he required repose and relief, but for these he sought in vain. He felt not a whit the better after a two days' stay, though the weather had suddenly cleared up, the sky become clear and bright, and the air brisk and bracing. Whithersoever _he_ went, he carried about him a thick gloom which no sunshine could penetrate, no breezes dissipate. He could find rest nowhere, neither at home nor abroad, neither alone nor in company, neither sleeping nor waking. His brow was clouded by a stern melancholy, his heart was bursting with a sense of defeat, shame, exposure, mortification; and with all his firmness of nerve, he could not contemplate the future but with a shudder of apprehension. In fact, he was in a state of intense nervous irritability and excitement from morning to night. On the evening of the third day after his arrival, the London paper, forwarded to him as usual from the neighboring library, contained a paragraph which excited him not a little; it being to the effect, that a named solicitor of eminence had been the day before appointed by the Lord Chancellor to that very office--the one, in truth, which Gammon knew his Lordship had all along destined for _him_; one which he could have filled to admiration, which would have given him permanent _status_ in society; the salary attached to it being, moreover, £1,800 a-year! Gammon laid down the paper--a mist came before his eyes--and a sense of desolation pervaded his soul. After a while his eye lit on another part of the paper--gracious heavens!--there were