So I was obliged to go off as quickly as might be; and the next morning Mamma and my sisters made breakfast for me at four, and at five came the “True Blue” light six-inside post-coach to London, and I got up on the roof without having seen Mary Smith.

As we passed the house, it did seem as if the window curtain in her room was drawn aside just a little bit.  Certainly the window was open, and it had been shut the night before:  but away went the coach; and the village, cottage, and the churchyard, and Hicks’s hayricks were soon out of sight.

* * * * *

“My hi, what a pin!” said a stable-boy, who was smoking a cigar, to the guard, looking at me and putting his finger to his nose.

The fact is, that I had never undressed since my aunt’s party; and being uneasy in mind and having all my clothes to pack up, and thinking of something else, had quite forgotten Mrs. Hoggarty’s brooch, which I had stuck into my shirt-frill the night before.

CHAPTER II

TELLS HOW THE DIAMOND IS BROUGHT UP TO LONDON, AND PRODUCES WONDERFUL EFFECTS BOTH IN THE CITY AND AT THE WEST END

The circumstances recorded in this story took place some score of years ago, when, as the reader may remember, there was a great mania in the City of London for establishing companies of all sorts; by which many people made pretty fortunes.

I was at this period, as the truth must be known, thirteenth clerk of twenty-four young gents who did the immense business of the Independent West Diddlesex Fire and Life Insurance Company, at their splendid stone mansion in Cornhill.  Mamma had sunk a sum of four hundred pounds in the purchase of an annuity at this office, which paid her no less than six-and-thirty pounds a year, when no other company in London would give her more than twenty-four.  The chairman of the directors was the great Mr. Brough, of the house of Brough and Hoff, Crutched Friars, Turkey Merchants.  It was a new house, but did a tremendous business in the fig and sponge way, and more in the Zante currant line than any other firm in the City.

Brough was a great man among the Dissenting connection, and you saw his name for hundreds at the head of every charitable society patronised by those good people.  He had nine clerks residing at his office in Crutched Friars; he would not take one without a certificate from the schoolmaster and clergyman of his native place, strongly vouching for his morals and doctrine; and the places were so run after, that he got a premium of four or five hundred pounds with each young gent, whom he made to slave for ten hours a day, and to whom in compensation he taught all the mysteries of the Turkish business.  He was a great man on ’Change, too; and our young chaps used to hear from the stockbrokers’ clerks (we commonly dined together at the “Cock and Woolpack,” a respectable house, where you