However, indigo had risen again, and your spirits also.  As we walked home, you gave me a precise exhibit of your income and expenditures for the last five years, and a prospective sketch of the same for the next ten; winding up with an incidental delineation of the importance, to a man of business, of a good pew in some respectable place of worship.  We found Mrs. D., as usual, ready at the table; we partook of pound-cake (or pound-and-a-half, I should say) and sundry hot cups of a very Cisatlantic beverage, called by the Chinese epithet of tea,—­and went, immediately after, to a prayer-meeting.  The church or chapel was much crowded, and there was a certain something in the atmosphere which seemed to disqualify my faculties from comprehending a single word that was spoken.  It certainly was not that the ventilators were closed, for there were none.  The minister occasionally requested that the windows might be let down a little, and the deacons invariably closed them again when he looked the other way.  At intervals, females were carried out, in a motionless condition,—­not, as it appeared, from conviction of sin, but from faintness.  You sat, absorbed in thought, with your eyes closed, and seemed not to observe them.  I remember that you were very much shocked when I suggested that the breath of an average sinner exhausted atmospheric air at the rate of a hogshead an hour, and asked you how much allowance the laws of the universe made for the lungs of church-members?  I do not recall your precise words, but I remember that I finally found it expedient, as I was to leave for home in the early train, to spend that night at the neighboring hotel, where I indulged, on an excellent mattress, in a slumber so profound, that it seemed next morning as if I ought, as Dick Swiveller suggested to the single gentleman, to pay for a double-bedded room.

Well, that is all over now.  You have given up business, from ill health, and exhibit a ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five.  Your dreams of the forthcoming ten years have not been exactly fulfilled; you have not precisely retired on a competency, because the competency retired from you.  Indeed, the suddenness with which your physician compelled you to close up your business left it closed rather imperfectly, so that most of the profits are found to have leaked out.  You are economizing rather strictly, just now, in respect to everything but doctors’ bills.  The maternal Dolorosa is boarding somewhere in the country, where the children certainly will not have more indigestible food than they had at home, and may get less of it in quantity,—­to say nothing of more air and exercise to aid digestion.  They are not, however, in perfect condition.  The twins are just getting up from scarlet fever; Nathaniel has been advised to leave school for a time; and something is thought to be the matter with Angelina’s back.  Meanwhile, you are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas.