“Elizabeth, my love, he must mean A, or B, or D,” I fancy I hear Lovel say; and she says, “Yes; oh! it is certainly D--his very image!” “D to a T,” says Lovel (who is a neat wit). _She_ may know that I mean to depict her husband in the above unpretending lines: but she will never let me know of her knowledge except by a little extra courtesy; except (may I make this pleasing exception?) by a few more invitations; except by a look of those unfathomable eyes (gracious goodness! to think she wore spectacles ever so long, and put a lid over them as it were!), into which, when you gaze sometimes, you may gaze so deep, and deep, and deep, that I defy you to plumb half-way down into their mystery. When I was a young man, I had lodgings in Beak Street, Regent Street (I no more have lived in Beak Street than in Belgrave Square: but I choose to say so, and no gentleman will be so rude as to contradict another)--I had lodgings, I say, in Beak Street, Regent Street. Mrs. Prior was the landlady’s name. She had seen better days--landladies frequently have. Her husband--he could not be called the landlord, for Mrs. P. was manager of the place,--had been, in happier times, captain or lieutenant in the militia; then of Diss, in Norfolk, of no profession; then of Norwich Castle, a prisoner for debt; then of Southampton Buildings, London, law-writer; then of the Bom-Retiro Cacadores, in the service of H. M. the Queen of Portugal, lieutenant and paymaster; then of Melina Place, St. George’s Fields, &c.--I forbear to give the particulars of an existence which a legal biographer has traced step by step, and which has more than once been the subject of judicial investigation by certain commissioners in Lincoln’s-inn Fields. Well, Prior, at this time, swimming out of a hundred shipwrecks, had clambered on to a lighter, as it were, and was clerk to a coal-merchant, by the river-side. “You conceive, sir,” he would say, “my employment is only temporary--the fortune of war, the fortune of war!” He smattered words in not a few foreign languages. His person was profusely scented with tobacco. Bearded individuals, padding the muddy hoof in the neighbouring Regent Street, would call sometimes of an evening, and ask for “the captain.” He was known at many neighbouring billiard-tables, and, I imagine, not respected. You will not see enough of Captain Prior to be very weary of him and his coarse swagger, to be disgusted by his repeated requests for small money-loans, or to deplore his loss, which you will please to suppose has happened before the curtain of our present drama draws up. I think two people in the world were sorry for him: his wife, who still loved the memory of the handsome young man who had wooed and won her; his daughter Elizabeth, whom for the last few months of his life, and up to his fatal illness, he every evening conducted to what he called her “academy.” You are right. Elizabeth is the principal character in this story.