would be made up of slow days, hours, and minutes. By the time he had crossed the stone bridge over the Floss and was entering St Ogg’s, he was thinking that he would buy his father’s mill and land again when he was rich enough, and improve the house and live there; he should prefer it to any smarter, newer place, and he could keep as many horses and dogs as he liked. Walking along the street with a firm, rapid step, at this point in his reverie he was startled by some one who had crossed without his notice, and who said to him in a rough, familiar voice: “Why, Master Tom, how’s your father this morning?” It was a publican of St Ogg’s, one of his father’s customers. Tom disliked being spoken to just then; but he said civilly, “He’s still very ill, thank you.” “Ay, it’s been a sore chance for you, young man, hasn’t it,—this lawsuit turning out against him?” said the publican, with a confused, beery idea of being good-natured. Tom reddened and passed on; he would have felt it like the handling of a bruise, even if there had been the most polite and delicate reference to his position. “That’s Tulliver’s son,” said the publican to a grocer standing on the adjacent door-step. “Ah!” said the grocer, “I thought I knew his features. He takes after his mother’s family; she was a Dodson. He’s a fine, straight youth; what’s he been brought up to?” “Oh! to turn up his nose at his father’s customers, and be a fine gentleman,—not much else, I think.” Tom, roused from his dream of the future to a thorough consciousness of the present, made all the greater haste to reach the warehouse offices of Guest & Co., where he expected to find his uncle Deane. But this was Mr Deane’s morning at the bank, a clerk told him, and with some contempt for his ignorance; Mr Deane was not to be found in River Street on a Thursday morning. At the bank Tom was admitted into the private room where his uncle was, immediately after sending in his name. Mr Deane was auditing accounts; but he looked up as Tom entered, and putting out his hand, said, “Well, Tom, nothing fresh the matter at home, I hope? How’s your father?” “Much the same, thank you, uncle,” said Tom, feeling nervous. “But I want to speak to you, please, when you’re at liberty.” “Sit down, sit down,” said Mr Deane, relapsing into his accounts, in which he and the managing-clerk remained so absorbed for the next half-hour that Tom began to wonder whether he should have to sit in this way till the bank closed,—there seemed so little tendency toward a conclusion in the quiet, monotonous procedure of these sleek, prosperous men of business. Would his uncle give him a place in the bank? It would be very dull, prosy work, he thought, writing there forever to the loud ticking of a timepiece. He preferred some other way of getting rich. But at last there was a change; his uncle took a pen and wrote something with a flourish at the end.