A pleasant life truly, but not, perhaps, a particularly reputable one. Certainly not one calculated for the formation of a City man of business according to Mr. Statham's interpretation of the term. When at the age of twenty the young man tore himself away from his Bohemian comrades, who kissed him fervently, and wept beery tears at his departure, and, in obedience to his father's commands, returned to England and to respectability, to take up his position in the paternal counting-house, Mr. Statham was considerably more astonished than gratified at the manner in which his son's time had been passed, and at its too evident results. About Humphrey there was nothing which could be called slang in the English sense of the term, certainly nothing vulgar; but there was a reckless abandon, a defiance of set propriety, a superb scorn for the respectable conventionality regulating the movements and the very thoughts of the circle in which Mr. Statham moved, which that worthy gentleman observed with horror, and which he considered almost as loathsome as vice itself. Previous to his presentation to the establishment over which he was to rule, Humphrey's long locks were clipped away, his light downy beard shaved off, his fantastic garments exchanged for sad-coloured soberly-cut clothes; and when this transformation had been accomplished, the young man was taken into the City and placed in the hands of Mr. Morrison the chief clerk, who was enjoined to give a strict account of his business qualifications. Mr. Morrison's report did not tend to dissipate the disappointment which had fallen like a blow on the old man's mind. Humphrey could talk German as glibly and with as good an accent as any Rhinelander from Manheim to Düsseldorf; he had picked up a vast amount of conversational French from the French artists who had formed part of his jolly society; and had command of an amount of argot which would have astonished Monsieur Philarète Chasles himself; but he had never been in the habit of either reading or writing anything but the smallest scraps of notes; and when Mr. Morrison placed before him a four-sided letter from their agent at Hamburg, couched in commercial German phraseology, and requested him to re-translate and answer it, Humphrey's expressive face looked so woe-begone and he boggled so perceptibly over the manuscript, that one of the junior clerks saw the state of affairs at a glance, and confidentially informed his neighbour at the next desk that "young S. was up a tree."