from his own hearth to the cheerful residence of Mr Levi in Cursitor Street, the poor little woman, after having indulged herself in the small luxury of a ‘good cry,’ would go to work to pack up shirts and socks manfully, and with great foresight, would always bring Jack’s daily food in a basket, seeing that Mr Levi’s bills are constructed upon a scale of uncommon dimensions; after which, she would eat the dinner with him in the coffee-room, drink to better days, play cribbage, and at last get very nearly as joyous in that greasy, grimy, sorrow-laden room, with bars on the outside of the windows, as if it were the happy home she possessed a few weeks ago, and which she always hoped to possess again.  As for the girls, they were trained by too good a master and mistress not to become apt scholars.  They knew what a bill of sale was from their tenderest years; the broker’s was no unfamiliar face; and they quite understood how to treat a man in possession.  Their management of duns was consummate.  Happy Jack used to listen to the comedy of excuses and coaxings; and when the importunate had departed, grumblingly and unpaid, he used solemnly to kiss his daughters on the forehead, and invoke all sorts of blessings upon his preservers, his good angels, his little girls, who were so clever, and so faithful, and so true.

And in many respects they were good girls.  The style in which they turned frocks, put a new appearance upon hoods, and cloaks, and bonnets, and came forth in what seemed the very lustre of novelty—­the whole got up by a skilful mutual adaptation of garments and parts of garments—­was wonderful to all lady beholders.  In cookery, they beat the famous chef who sent up five courses and a dessert, made out of a greasy pair of jack-boots and the grass from the ramparts of the besieged town.  Their wonderful little made-dishes were mere scraps and fragments, which in any other house would have been flung away, but which were so artistically and scientifically handled by the young ladies, and so tossed up, and titivated, and eked out with gravies, and sauces, and strange devices of nondescript pasty, that Happy Jack, feasting upon these wonderful creations of ingenuity, used to vow that he never dined so well as when there was nothing in the house for dinner.  To their wandering, predatory life the whole family were perfectly accustomed.  A sudden turn out of quarters they cared no more for than hardened old dragoons.  They never lost pluck.  One speculation down, another came on.  Sometimes the little household was united.  A bit of luck in the City or the West had been achieved, and Happy Jack issued cards for ‘At Homes,’ and behaved, and looked, and spoke like an alderman, or the member of a house of fifty years’ standing.  When strangers saw his white waistcoat, and blue coat with brass buttons, and heard him talk of a glut of gold, and money being a mere drug, they speculated as to whether he was the governor or the vice-governor of the Bank of England,