well enough, and to Clarissa and her household
was as a fragrant Plutus daily rising from his
steaming vats. But Miss Clarissa suffered herself
to be tempted and led astray. She balanced
her books carefully; but, unable to hedge, set her
all on the gold, and came out at the wrong end—
nowhere! Cashbox had as much thought of
marrying her as of marrying his mother's pretty
maid. She was all very well—and he had a great
regard for her—and she was a nice girl, with no
nonsense about her—a fine dashing sparkling
brunette, who danced like an angel, and flirted like a
woman—but one's favourite partner for a polka
or the Schottische is not always the wife of one's
choice: and so poor Miss Clarissa found to her
enduring grief. For the week after she had let her
homely Dorking fly, on the chance of snaring the
peacock in the hedge, young Cashbox formally
announced his engagement with Miss Muchacre
of Muchacre, who, in her turn, might have
flown at the peerage ogling her from behind the
hedge, but who was wise in her generation;
preferring to hold what she had rather than risk
the loss both of what she had and of what she
hoped.

What was it but the realisation of the same
saw when that wrong-headed and conceited
jackanapes Penly, the Author, as he was
always proclaiming himself—as if authors were
black swans in these inky days, and not plentiful
as blackberries or house-sparrows—well! was
it not letting slip the bird in the hand, when he
refused the one hundred pounds actually offered
for his wretched novel, vowing he would take
nothing under four times that sum, at lowest?
He knew of a certain person, he said, who had
praised and appraised his rubbish and who had
counselled him to "stand out;" so he did stand
out. And to this day his novel lies in the right-
hand drawer of his study-table, unbought, un-
published, and unknown! and likely to remain
so.

Raphael Maulstick did the same thing, poor
fellow, when he refused the dealer's hard bargain,
and stood his chance on the Exhibition.
It was a hard bargain, no doubt, and yet it
was better than none; and so Mrs. Raphael
thought when the Hanging Committee returned
a polite rejection, and the chance was lost.
The empty cupboard soon held only the ghosts
of hunger and poverty; and when the children
cried for bread, there was nothing for them but
their father's paint-box, and the Last Supper
done in oils: but not after Da Vinci. The
dealer's seven pounds ten would at least have
paid for bread; but now—both had gone—both
that ugly, disappointing, little bird in the hand,
and those other glorious visions in the bush, of
academic acceptance, loud public notice, and
a lumping sum of gold at the end, enough to
cover the canvas an inch thick. Alas! alas!
that pleasant dreams should have so mean a
waking!

Sometimes though, it is good policy to loose
the fingers cramped over a titmouse to try
after the capture of a fine fat partridge feeding
in the stubble. This is the puzzling part
of it. If it were always wisest to hold on—
well! we should know the proper course to
take on all occasions; and if it were always
the better thing to try for the higher game,
then the world would spend its days in devising
landing-nets and fowling-pieces, and in bringing
the act of capture to the highest point of
perfection. But as it is sometimes the one and
sometimes the other, who on earth knows what
to do for certain, and when the right hand holds
the key of success, and when the left? There
was old Hunks now:—he bowed and scraped his
son into an appointment in the Post-office, and
thought he had got round to the back of a
miracle, no less, when he had done it. As it
was, the young fellow was as unfit for his work
as if he had been born with stiff knees and
made to sit cross-legged. He knew nothing of
routine work, and cared nothing for the Post-
office; indeed, he thought letter-writing a mistake,
and her Majesty's mails might have all foundered
between the Mansion House and St. Martin's-
le-Grand for anything he would have cared. His
soul was in an engine-room, with its arms up
to the elbows in steel-filings and railway-grease;
that was where his delight lay, and nothing else
could have satisfied him. Still, the Post-office
was a certainty, and its foundations were of
very solid masonry, while the engine-room was
only a possibility, and might be a mere castle in
the clouds, turning to rain and melting away
into mist when sought to be furnished and
inhabited. Yet it was such a cherished
possibility to him!—such a pleasant brace of
cockatoos hiding behind the hedge. If he could but
lay a little salt on their tails and bag them without
more ado! At all events he would try.
So he gave up the Post-office, stripped off his
coat, and went at it. And though he was old
for his work, still he was young for his hope,
and in energy too, and of the nature that enjoys
a hunt after hedge birds. It did not take him
long to master the great problem; and when I
last heard of him he had caught a whole row of
blackbirds—four-and-twenty of them they said
—out there in Spain, where he was sent an
engineering to the satisfactory oiling of his
chariot wheels. "Every one has not his luck,"
grumbled young Lightfoot, with his nose still
at the grindstone. Just so; but then every
one has not his energy, his perseverance, or his
skill, and is not already consecrate by nature to
a neat-handed salt-laying on the tail of the
great bird Success.

The same kind of thing befel Bounty. Bounty
was taken on at Jones's, to teach the little boys
their Gradus ad Parnassum, at a yearly salary
representing as many banyan days as there are
days in the year. Bounty's hand just once closed
over that unfledged crow, and then flung it
away in disdain. A certain pair of nightingales
sat in the bay-tree beside him, and they sang
such sweet songs of hope and encouragement
that Bounty thought the chase not so very
desperate a matter—and none the more
desperate because challenged. So he, too, went
at it with his little wallet of salt—bay salt,