“Thank you, Sir,” said the shivering lad, and, giving up the yellow roll and taking the loose coppers offered him in the quickest possible time, he scampered off around the corner of Water Street and left Chip in company with two temptations.

“Now,” thought Chip, “it will be certainly a clean and gentlemanly thing, if, after having relieved this poor little devil of his trouble and responsibility, I should oblige the still poorer devil of a concern up-stairs by giving ’em this postcript of foreign news, which, by working so late, they will probably have exclusively.  That would be most truly honest, benevolent, and philanthropic.  It would make at least one newspaper my friend, and, on the whole, it is something of a temptation.  But let me see what it will cost.”

Giving the black door a vigorous push, he entered, and by the gas-burner on the first landing discovered that the postcript in his possession gave the state of the Liverpool cotton-market a day later than the body of the dispatch, which had already gone into type, and, what was more to the purpose, announced a rise of a penny-and-a-half on the pound.  Chip clutched the gauzy sheets in his fist, closed the door as softly as possible, and yielded himself a doomed captive to temptation number two.  Here was a little fortune on the cotton he had in store at any rate, and, if he really had in his grasp all the news of the rise, he might make by it a plump ten thousand dollars out of Captain Grant’s “Orion.”  But to this end he must be sure that not a lisp of the rise would be published in the morning papers, and he must see Captain Grant and close his bargain for the “Orion’s” cargo before the wires should begin to furnish additional news by the “Africa” to the evening papers.  They would not, after obtaining such news, lose a moment in parading it on their bulletin-boards, and Captain Grant might get hold of it before reaching the little counting-room in India Street.  Chip, of course, saw what to do, and did it.  Waiting in one of the little “meals-at-all-hours” saloons till he heard the churning of the press-engines, he sallied out and bought of the overloaded carriers the earliest copies of the morning papers, and made himself sure that the foreign news did not disclose any change of the cotton-market.  The next thing was to transfer himself to Captain Grant’s residence in Waltham,—­exactly whereabout in Waltham he did not know, but, of course, he could easily find out,—­and, without exciting the grouty old salt’s suspicions of false play, make sure of the cotton at his own price.  On the whole, he thought it safer, as well as cheaper, to use the early train than to hire a special team.