Married clerks in banks and merchants' offices, with small salaries and large families, formed the bulk of the occupants of these dwellings. Besides these there were generally one or two retired military men in the street; they also with encumbrances, wives and families, that were rather slip-shod, whereas the military men themselves preserved a certain amount of fashion in their attire. These gallant officers and their belongings were wont, however, to encamp for a while only as it were in the street. They never stayed long, but would vanish unostentatiously without fuss of any kind, leaving behind painful regrets in the memories of sundry rate-collectors and tradesmen. These nomadic warriors alone of all that street's inhabitants were not quite respectable, though distinctly genteel. It was, in short, a dull Brixton street such as our London suburbs have hundreds of, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all, for it terminated at its further end in a wilderness of "eligible building land," a desert of mud and broken crockery that was only awaiting the advent of the speculative builder to become yet one more excrescence of this swollen metropolis. Of all the respectable houses of this highly respectable street none were more respectable than No. 22. No grocer hesitated before he permitted Mrs. Grimm to run up a three months' account at his shop; for was not Mr. Grimm known to be a man of substance? He was a lawyer in the city, a solicitor in fair but not clean practice: a Perpetual Commissioner of Oaths too, it was whispered, and to the outside world such a title could not but imply more than respectability, it even savoured of dignity. Again he was wont to come punctually home to his dinner every evening at seven; he had been five years at No. 22, and had always paid his way; and finally, what established his credit more than all else, he was known to own no less than three houses in the street, bringing him in some thirty pounds a year each. The household of No. 22 consisted of this gentleman, his daughter, who was sixteen years old at the period this story opens, and his second wife. One maid-servant "did" for the family with the assistance of the daughter. Mrs. Grimm did not condescend to work, but she _superintended_ energetically. Thus it will be seen that though Mr. Grimm was fairly well off he did not waste his means in ostentation, and kept up his establishment on an economical footing. One of our most distinguished novelists started life as a gambler. He was remarkably successful at play, and was rapidly amassing a fortune; but one day, we are told, he happened to perceive the reflection of his face in a mirror, when he was so horrified at the haggard appearance it presented, that he incontinently threw up his destructive pursuit for that of literature, in which he became even more successful than at the green table.