of loyal enthusiasm, Prince Regent
Mumchance. This patronymic is a sore point and
grievous stumbling-block with Mumchance.
The Prince Regent is his old man of the sea,
his .white elephant of Ava. He is fond of
political discussion. What could an
individual bearing so illustrious a name be but
an out-and-out, an ultra-cerulean Conservative.
So Mumchance is a Tory of the bitterest
description; and as the majority of the Renters
are as bitter Radicals, opposing rates, taxes,
rents, or indeed any other imposts,
vehemently, the discussions that nightly take
place in the parlour of the Cape of Good
Hope are not of the pleasantest description.
Moreover, Mumchance is fond of his glass;
and could you expect an individual bearing
the august name of the great champion of
rare beverages (it is whispered, even, the
inventor of hock and soda-water) to consume
such vulgar liquids as porter, or gin, or rum?
No. P. E. Mumchance never asks you if you
will take a glass of ale, or a "drain" of gin.
"Glass of sherry wine, sir?" is the Prince
.Regent's hospitable interrogatory; and a good
many glasses of sherry wine does the Prince
Regent take in the course of the twenty-four
hours.

Mumchance keeps a shop—a stationer's
shop. He sells stationery, account books,
slates and slate pencils, tops, marbles, string,
paste, and, by some curious idiosyncracy,
pickles. How he got into that line, or how
he can reconcile pickles with writing paper,
I cannot imagine; but there are the pickles—
walnut, onion, and mixed—in big earthen
jars; and at all hours of the day you may
see small brigades of children bearing
halfpence and cracked teacups or gallipots, bound
to Mumchance's for "a pennorth of pickles,
please."

But pray don't think that although
Mumchauce is a stationer and account-
book manufacturer, his shop is at all like a
stationer's. Not at all. It is considerably
more like the warehouse of a wholesale
tobacconist who has sold his stock out; and
it has, if I must be candid, a considerable
dash of the marine store and of the rag-shop.
There is a ghostly remnant of a whilom
gigantic pair of scales; there are mysterious
tubs and packing cases, and bulging parcels
tied with rotten cord. Mumchance does not
deny that he buys waste paper; the
evilminded whisper that he buys and sells rags:
nay, old Mrs. Brush, the veteran inhabitant
alluded to in a former paper, minds the
time when a doll—a real black doll—swung
backward and forward in the wind over
the door of Toby, commonly hight old
Nutcrackers, the father of Prince Regent
Mumchance.

That Mumchance is mad many have
declared; but I, for one, do not believe it.
That Mumchance is queer, very queer in
manners, appearance, and general character,
no one can deny. He is an undersized
man, whose portrait can be succinctly
drawn if I tell you that he is an utter stranger
to the brush. By the brush I mean the
clothes-brush, and the hat-brush, the hair-
brush, the tooth-brush, the nail-brush, and, I
may add, the flesh-brush. Buhl-work is a
beautiful style of ornamentation, so is
marqueterie, so is Venetian mosaic; but when
you happen to find buhl, marqueterie, and
mosaic, all represented in a gentleman's face
and hands by a complicated inlaying and
ingraining of dirt, the spectacle will hardly be
so pleasant, I fancy, as examples of the same
arts in a cabinet, an escrutoire, or the cupola
of St. Mark's church. So mosaicised is
Mumchance. Bets have been freely made that he
never washes; but he has been observed to
rub his face occasionally with a very mouldy
pocket handkerchief of no discoverable size
or colour, conjectured to be either a fragment
of an old window-blind, or one of the old
rags purchased by his father Toby in the way
of business. Even this occasional friction of
his countenance, however, is not supposed to
advance in Mumchance the cause of that
state which is said to be next to godliness;
he wipes his face indeed; but he only removes
the impurities of the day, of the hour, to
show, in all its distinctness, the inlaid dirt ot
perchance years. It is just as when examining
an old picture you pass a wet cloth over its
surface; and lo! the mellowness of centuries
becomes visible to you beneath.

Mumchance's head is, if I may use the
expression, rhomboidal. His hair is, as before
stated, utterly unbrushed, somewhat of the
colour of an unbaked brick, and generally in
a state which I may characterise as fluffy.
In fact, minute particles of straw, paper,
cotton, bread, and other foreign substances,
may freely be detected on its surface by the
naked eye alone, which may partially be
accounted for, by his carrying most of his
purchases, sometimes his letters, and always
his lunch, in his hat. His whiskers, which
are of the same colour, or the same discoloration,
as his hair, do not appear to have made
up their minds yet as to where they shall
settle, and have grown irregularly about his
face, just as things happened to turn up. His
complexion I may describe heraldically as a
field gules, semé (I believe that is the word),
with sable or dirt. No sign of shirt appears
in the entire Mumchance. A big black stock
confines his neck, and to his chin rises his
closely-buttoned blue swallow-tailed coat—
that woeful blue coat with the odd buttons
once gilt, and once tightly sewn on, but now
drooping like Ophelia's willow, askant the
brook; the sleeves too short, the tails too
long, the many darns, and the nap all turned
the wrong way. Add to this coat (without
the connecting isthmus of a waistcoat) a pair
of corduroy trousers, of which the pockets,
apparently disgusted with their long seclusion,
have burst forth to see the world, and stand
agape, on Mumchance's hips, at its wonders;