have to return at last to a vulgar little chandler’s-shop in a riverside street, where a wife in a print bodice and a white apron was sitting up for him; sometimes even crying—for nothing at all—as if the circumstances were not depressing enough for him already. These little excursions cost money, of course, but then what was the good of keeping an ignoble little shop if you couldn’t get money out of it? And the shop did very well. Mrs. Butson and the girl—the cripple—were boiling bacon (the smell was disgusting) all day long, and they sold it as fast as it was cold. And other things sold excellently too. From the time when she took the shutters down in the morning to the time when the lad Johnny put them up at night, Mrs. Butson was unceasingly at work serving—unless she were boiling—and scarce had five minutes for her meals; and often the girl had to leave the bacon and help in the shop too. Very well—all that meant profit. The woman couldn’t make him believe that it didn’t, merely because the wretched details of trade failed to interest him. That was the way of people in that class of life—there was a touch of the miser about all of them. No matter how the money came in, they persisted in their narrow views as to spending it. And there was other income, in addition. The lad Johnny—he was almost a man to look at—brought his mother eight shillings a week at the time of the wedding, and then ten shillings, and then twelve; more, it would increase two shillings a year; but in truth his mother was unduly extravagant in buying him clothes. Still at anyrate there was something, and there might be more if only Mrs. Butson would turn the girl out to earn a little, instead of letting her waste her time reading, and confirming her in habits of idleness. And there was the rent from the cottage. This came every week by postal order from Bob Smallpiece, and since it was fitting that a husband should open letters sent his wife by a single man, Mr. Butson cashed the orders without troubling her in the matter at all. So that indeed he was not at all wasteful, considering both his income and the society he moved in—for he was not slow in making acquaintances among the affable gentility of the bars. In fact he would have done it cheaper still but for the pestilent uncertainty of Spring Handicaps. It would seem impossible for him to put half a sovereign on any horse without dooming it to something very near the last place. The distinguished society of the bars was profoundly astonished, indeed distressed, at his ill-luck; but gave him more excellent information for future events; information, however, that brought even worse luck with it.