George looked more and more confused; he replied--"that he could neither make machines, nor did he know anything of music." "Then I hope it's not a genius for making ballads, is it?" continued the other. "I have written ballads," answered George, hesitatingly. "Oh, then, you must try the west end--you won't do for the city," added the broker; "your genius is an article that's not in demand here." George left the office of the London citizen, mortified and humiliated. For a dozen long years everybody had told him he was a genius; and now, when the question was put to him--"what had he a genius for?" he could not answer it. This rebuff rendered him melancholy for several days, and he wandered from street to street, sometimes standing, unconscious of what he was doing, before the window of a bookseller, till, jostled by the crowd, he moved on, and again took his stand before the window of the printseller, the jeweller, or the vender of caricatures. Still he believed that he was a genius, and he was conscious that that genius might make him a fortune; only he knew not how to apply it--he was puzzled where to begin. Yet he did not despair. He thought the day would come--but how it was to come he knew not. He took out his uncle's letter, which his father had put into his hands when he left him, and he read it again, and said, it was all very good, but what was he the better of it?--it was all very true--too true, for he understood every word of it now; and he turned round his arm, and examined his coat with a sigh, and beheld that the lining was beginning to show its unwelcome face through the seams of the elbows. I should have told you that he was then sitting in a coffee-house, sipping his three-halfpence-worth of coffee, and _kitchening_ his pennyworth of bread, which was but half-a-slice, slightly buttered--and a thin slice, too, compared with those of his mother's cutting. He was beginning to feel one of the first rewards of genius--_eating by measure_! To divert the melancholy of his feelings, and the gloom of his prospects, he took up a magazine which lay on the table before him. His eyes fell upon a review of a poem which had been lately published, and for which the author was said to have received a thousand guineas! "_A thousand guineas!_" exclaimed George, dropping the magazine--"a _thousand guineas_! I shall make a fortune yet!"