for the accomplished gentleman or the titled lady and the vulgar tradesman-to what was then the resort of the great and fashionable Margate. Madge, good woman, had suggested Gravesend, but Mr. Snobbins' more aspiring soul soared a higher flight : he chose Margate. Was it presentiment or was it fate?

A rather untoward fate he thought it, which gave him for his next neighbour at the hotel dinner table, a Miss Brooke; a tall, handsome, and most fashionably-attired young lady. He was struck by her appearance, as were others of the company, but awed, or to speak more correctly, cowed by her manners, which certainly were not of that "hail-fellow, well-met kind which prevailed among his intimates in Budge Row, and which he fancied were somewhat more repellant towards him, than to the circle generally.

It might be so.

had filled out the

""

Years and prosperity

outward man of Abel

Snobbins, but had not enlightened the

inner one with more assumption, more freedom, more familiarity, he was still precisely the unenlightened, narrow-minded tallow-chandler of twenty years before; and as to his little wife, as round as a ball, as quiet as a mouse, as easy as an old shoe, and though not fine, still much finer than usual, and bedizened in the newest fashion of Budge Row, she was little calculated to raise her husband in the estimation of a fashionable exotic like Miss Brooke.

Still fascinated, somewhat as it may be in the way which a dove is by a rattle snake, so was Mr. Snobbins attracted by Miss Brooke. Even the airs, which some might have called supercilious, he rather admired, as characteristic of her high breeding. But we are wrong; Miss Brooke was really well-bred, and was much too nice a woman to give herself supercilious airs to anybody. She could perfectly well teach her inferiors their place, without coarsely wounding their self-love. Mr.

Snobbins could almost have crouched beneath the shadow of her shoe-tie," so queen-like did he feel her deportment to be; yet withal, a certain graciousness robbed all her haughtiness of its sting. Every night, as he folded up his coat and laid it on the drawers, he said to Madge," that really that Miss Brooke was a very nice woman ;" an opinion to which poor sleepy Madge always cordially acceded. Indeed I hardly suppose there would have been a dissentient voice in the hotel, for Miss Brooke really was a very nice woman.

It was some four or five years after this expedition, that good Mrs. Margaret Snobbins, née Hitchman, died. She had long been in a declining way, and without much suffering, expired peaceably at last, recommending with her last breath to her eldest son, now a partner in the concern, to stick close to the melting pot, and always to superintend the dipping himself. Poor Madge! she then went out like the snuff of a candle.

For some time Mr. Snobbins seemed stupified by his loss; all his domestic avocations were interrupted: all his usual habits broken in upon; the very circumstance of the servant calling him to dinner instead of his wife, seemed to paralyse his appetite. All the kindness and attention of his excellent son, Jack-now, however, going to be married, and called Mr. John -failed to excite his father from the stupor which had fallen upon him; nor was it until the receipt of a letter from Abel, who had lately and suddenly gone abroad, in which he lamented his idolized mother in a burst of passionate grief, which vividly recalled all her unassuming benevolence and winning virtues, that the unhappy widower was awakened to a full sense of his loss.

His grief, when, at length, excited, was violent and overpowering; but, as with time, it subsided-he did not seem to recover his former energies; he still seemed inert, indolent, half asleep. Mr. John had

yet to learn that this was his father's natural bent, and that his active, successful, career in life had been mainly prompted and supported by the unobtrusive, unsuspected, but always energetic influence of his lamented mother. Her untiring energies had been the the mainspring of all their well doing.

However, with the view to awaken his father's higher energies, and the hope to restore his certainly impaired health, Mr. John urged him to try change of air and scene; and having a very lively recollection of the impression Margate had made on him on his well-remembered visit there, succeeded not without difficulty, in persuading him to return thither. Mr. Snobbins, spiritless and indifferent, yielded to his son's representations and went.

He was standing, with his hands behind his back, on the wooden jetty, then called pier, gazing somewhat vacantly on the urchins below, making holes in the sands and