“Vell, ain’t ye a-going to pay us the extra bob, you gent?” cried the cab-man, as he mounted sulkily to his seat and drew a sack round his knees although it was in the middle of summer--so strong is the force of habit. Mr. Styles deigned no reply to this derogatory adjuration; but, having given his card to the servant, he entered the great man’s great house--while the cab drove away at a pace which seemed to intimate that the horse had become as sulky as its master. The hall was very magnificent: but every thing was new. The statues--the vases--the marble pillars--the gilding on the doors that opened into the ground-floor apartments--even to the liveries of the servants lounging about,--all was new! Mr. Styles was shown into a small parlour, where the pictures--the mirrors--the mantle ornaments--the furniture--the carpet--the hangings,--every thing there was likewise new. The paint scarcely seemed to have dried, nor the putty in the window-frames to have hardened. In a few minutes the domestic, who had left Mr. Styles alone during that interval, returned with the intimation that Mr. Podgson would see him at once; and the railway projector was forthwith conducted up a wide and handsome marble stair-case--through a splendidly furnished ante-room--into a sumptuous apartment, where the great man was seated at a table covered with railway plans, letters, maps, newspapers, visitors’ cards, and Acts of Parliament, all scattered about in a confusion that had been admirably well _studied_ and _purposely arranged_. The impression of the _newness_ of every thing in the mansion was strengthened in the mind of Mr. Bubbleton Styles at every pace which he had taken from the hall-door into the room where he now found himself. It appeared as if Mr. Podgson--or Mr. Podgson’s wife--or both, had endeavoured to the utmost of human power to crowd the apartments, the stair-cases, the landings, and, in fact, every nook and corner, with as many evidences of wealth as possible. Fine paintings by old masters, set in bran new glittering frames, were hung in the very worst lights, and without the least regard to their relative styles, colouring, or subjects. Each room had two or three time-pieces in it; and as they were not in accordance with respect to the hour, Mr. Bubbleton Styles’s ideas of precision and punctuality received a severe shock when he heard ten o’clock proclaimed half-a-dozen different times during the first twenty minutes which elapsed after he first set foot in the mansion. In a word, the entire aspect of the house was a reflection of the vulgar, untasteful, and self-sufficient minds of the “stuck-up people” who, having grown suddenly rich, did not know how to render their dwelling elegant and comfortable without making it gaudy and ridiculously ostentatious in its appointments.