The picture of a working man, with large features, overhanging forehead, and great grey eyes, all out of harmony with one another. His hands are hard and horny, his chin is unshaven, and his hair is almost white. This is Seth Dumbrick, going down the hill of life. The picture of a woman, working in an attic in a poor neighbourhood, within a mile of Rosemary Lane. Her fingers are long and supple, streaks of silver are in her hair, and she has "quite a genteel figure," according to the dictum of her neighbours, who are led to that opinion by the circumstance of the woman being thin and graceful. She is cunning with the needle, as the saying is, but not so cunning as to be able by its aid to butter her bread at every meal; therefore, very often she eats it dry. She is not contented; she is not resigned; but she does not openly repine. She is merely passive. The fire and enthusiasm of life are not dead within her soul, but by the exercise of a hidden force, she keeps all traces of it from the eye of man; she has dreams, but no human being shares them with her, or knows of them. She speaks in a calm even tone, and her voice is low and sweet, but if it expresses feeling or passion, the expression springs from a quality belonging to itself, and not from the revealed emotions of the speaker. She works hard from morning till night in a dull, listless fashion, performing her task conscientiously, and receiving at the end of the week, without thanks or murmurs, the pitiful payment for so many thousands of yards of stitches from the hands of a man who lives in a great house in Lancaster Gate and keeps a score of servants, and a dozen horses in his town stables. This man is a contractor, and he fattens on misery. He will undertake to clothe twenty thousand men in a month, and patient, weak-eyed women who can scarcely get shoes to their feet are working for him, upon starvation wages, through the weary watches of the night. From their poverty and misery comes the wherewithal to pay for his wine and his horses and his fine linen. He was not born to riches; in his earlier years he experienced severe hardships, and frequently had to live on a crust. Those times are gone, never to return, and, strange to say, he has, in his present high state, no feeling of compassion for his once comrades who are suffering as he suffered, and who cannot escape from their bondage. Then he was glad to eat his bread and meat, when he could get it, with the help of a pocket-knife and his fingers; now he can dine off gold plate if he chooses. There is a well-known saying that there is a tide in the affairs of man, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. It is a popular fallacy. Such a tide, with such a golden prize in its flood, comes to not one man in a thousand, but it came to the contractor for whom this woman works, and he took it at its flood. He worked his way from small contracts to large, from large to larger.