CHAPTER V.—­The Stalking Horse.

“Retributive Justice”

On the same landing where Timmis (as he termed it) ‘held out,’ were five or six closets nick-named offices, and three other boys.  One was the nephew of the before-mentioned Wallis, and a very imp of mischief; another, only a boy, with nothing remarkable but his stupidity; while the fourth was a scrubby, stunted, fellow, about sixteen or seventeen years of age, with a long pale face, deeply pitted with the small-pox, and an irregular crop of light hair, most unscientifically cut into tufts.

He, by reason of his seniority and his gravity, soon became the oracle of the party.  We usually found him seated on the stairs of the first floor, lost in the perusal of some ragged book of the marvellous school—­scraps of which he used to read aloud to us, with more unction than propriety, indulging rather too much in the note of admiration style; for which he soon obtained the name of Old Emphatic!—­But I must confess we did obtain a great deal of information from his select reading, and were tolerably good listeners too, notwithstanding his peculiar delivery, for somehow he appeared to have a permanent cold in his head, which sometimes threw a tone of irresistible ridicule into his most pathetic bits.

He bore the scriptural name of Matthew and was, as he informed us, a ’horphan’—­adding, with a particular pathos, ‘without father or mother!’ His melancholy was, I think, rather attributable to bile than destitution, which he superinduced by feeding almost entirely on ‘second-hand pastry,’ purchased from the little Jew-boys, who hawk about their ‘tempting’ trash in the vicinity of the Bank.

Matthew, like other youths of a poetical temperament, from Petrarch down to Lord Byron, had a ‘passion.’

I accidentally discovered the object of his platonic flame in the person of the little grubby-girl—­the servant of the house-keeper—­for, as the proverb truly says,

“Love and a cough cannot be hid.”

The tender passion first evinced itself in his delicate attentions;—­nor was the quick-eyed maid slow to discover her conquest.  Her penetration, however, was greater than her sympathy.  With a tact that would not have disgraced a politician—­in a better cause, she adroitly turned the swelling current of his love to her own purposes.

As the onward flowing stream is made to turn the wheel, while the miller sings at the window, so did she avail herself of his strength to do her work, while she gaily hummed a time, and sadly ‘hummed’ poor Matthew.