of the world, who was supposed by these working men at home to be a very paragon of a governor.  If he had been had home, so said the working men, no Committee of the House would have been able to make anything of him.  They might have asked him questions week after week, and he would have answered them all fluently and would have committed nobody.  He knew all the ins and outs of governing, did Mr Thomas Smith, and was a match for the sharpest Committee that ever sat at Westminster.  Poor Sir Marmaduke was a man of a very different sort; all of which was known by the working men; but the Parliamentary interest had been too strong, and here was Sir Marmaduke at home.  But the working men were not disposed to make matters so pleasant for Sir Marmaduke as Sir Marmaduke had expected.  The Committee would not examine Sir Marmaduke till after Easter, in the middle of April; but it was expected of him that, he should read blue-books without number, and he was so catechised by the working men that he almost began to wish himself back at the Mandarins.  In this way the new establishment in Manchester Street was not at first in a happy or even in a contented condition.

At last, after about ten days, Lady Rowley did succeed in obtaining an interview with Trevelyan.  A meeting was arranged through Bozzle, and took place in a very dark and gloomy room at an inn in the City.  Why Bozzle should have selected the Bremen Coffee House, in Poulter’s Alley, for this meeting no fit reason can surely be given, unless it was that he conceived himself bound to select the most dreary locality within his knowledge on so melancholy an occasion.  Poulter’s Alley is a narrow dark passage somewhere behind the Mansion House; and the Bremen Coffee House—­why so called no one can now tell—­is one of those strange houses of public resort in the City at which the guests seem never to eat, never to drink, never to sleep, but to come in and out after a mysterious and almost ghostly fashion, seeing their friends or perhaps their enemies, in nooks and corners, and carrying on their conferences in low melancholy whispers.  There is an aged waiter at the Bremen Coffee House; and there is certainly one private sitting-room upstairs.  It was a dingy, ill-furnished room, with an old large mahogany table, an old horse-hair sofa, six horse-hair chairs, two old round mirrors, and an old mahogany press in a corner.  It was a chamber so sad in its appearance that no wholesome useful work could have been done within it; nor could men have eaten there with any appetite, or have drained the flowing bowl with any touch of joviality.  It was generally used for such purposes as that to which it was now appropriated, and no doubt had been taken by Bozzle on more than one previous occasion.  Here Lady Rowley arrived precisely at the hour fixed, and was told that the gentleman was waiting up stairs for her.