the floor, and a consequent relaxation of those narrow, worldly (some call them prudent) scruples, which landladies are apt to nourish.  Hints of a regular income, payable four times a year, have their weight; nay, often convert weekly into quarterly lodgings.  Be sure there are no children in your house.  They are vociferous when you would enjoy domestic retirement, and inquisitive when you take the air.  Once (horresco referens!) on returning from my peripatetics, I was accosted with brutally open-mouthed clamour, by my landlady, who, dragging me in a state of bewilderment into her room, pointed to numerous specimens of granite, which her “young people” had, in their unhallowed thirst for knowledge, discovered and drawn from my trunk, which, by some strange mischance, had been left unlocked!  In vain I mumbled something touching my love of mineralogy, and that a lapidary had offered I knew not what for my collection.  I was compelled to “bundle,” as the idiomatic, but ignorant woman expressed herself.  To resume.

Let not the nervous or sensitive wit imagine that, in a vast metropolis like London, his chance of securing an appropriate lodging and a confiding landlady is at all doubtful.  He might lodge safe from the past, certain of the future, till the crash of doom.  I shall be met by Ferguson’s case.  Ferguson I knew well, and I respected him.  But he had a most unfortunate countenance.  It was a very solemn, but by no means a solvent face; and yet he had a manner with him too, and his language was choice, if not persuasive.  That the matter of his speech was plausible, none ever presumed to deny.  “It is all very well, Mr. Ferguson,”—­that was always conceded.  I do not wish to speak ill of the dead; but Ferguson never entered a lodging without being compelled to pay a fortnight in advance, and always

[Illustration:  EXPECTED TO BE OUT SHORTLY.]

3rd. Of Good Dinners.—­Wits, like other men, are distinguished by a variety of tastes and inclinations.  Some prefer dining at taverns and eating-houses; others, more discreet or less daring, love the quiet security of the private house, with its hospitable inmates, courteous guests, and no possibility of “bill transactions.”  I confess when I was young and inexperienced, wanting that wisdom which I am now happy to impart, I was a constant frequenter of taverns, eating-houses, oyster-rooms, and similar places of entertainment.  I am old now, and have been persecuted by a brutal world, and am grown timid.  But I was ever a peaceable man—­hated quarrels—­never came to words if I could help it. I do not recommend the tavern, eating-house, oyster-room system. These are the words of wisdom.  The waiters at these places are invariably sturdy, fleet, abusive rascals, who cannot speak and will not listen to reason.  To eat one’s dinner, drink a pint of sherry, and then, calling for the bill, take out one’s pocket-book, and post it in its rotation in a neat