What has come over the ruling spirit of the offices in 'Change Alley? The partners in the great mercantile houses, whose shipbroking is there carried on, cannot understand it, and the men in the tall fluffy hats, the frock-coats, and the shepherd's plaid trousers, whom no one would suspect to be the captains of merchant vessels fully certificated, long-serviced, and ready to sail on any navigable water in the world, shrug their shoulders and mutter hoarsely to each other in the luncheon-room at Lloyd's, that 'something must be up with Mr. Statham.' The clerk who gives a maritime flavour to the office by wearing a pea-jacket, and who in default of any possible boating on the Thames or Serpentine is, during the winter, compelled to give vent to his nautical tendencies by vocal references at convivial supper-parties to his Lovely Nan, his Polly of Portsmouth, and other of the late Mr. Dibdin's creation, opines that there is a young woman in the case, and that his governor has 'got smote.' Another of the clerks, an elderly man with a wooden leg and a melancholy mind, who had more than once failed in business on his own account, began to hint in a mysterious manner that he foresaw bankruptcy impending, and that they should all have to look out for new situations before the spring. Mr. Collins, to whom all the querists addressed themselves, and at whom all the indirect hints were levelled, said nothing; he even refused to admit to the general public that there was any perceptible difference in Mr. Statham's manner. Only in conjugal confidence, as he smoked his after-supper pipe in the neatly-furnished parlour of his residence in Balaclava-buildings East, Lower Clapham-road, he confessed to Mrs. C. that the chief had somehow lost his relish for business, and that he did not think Mr. S. was the man he had been.