The wine merchant sat in his dining-room next morning, to receive the personal applicants² for the vacant post in his establishment.  It was an old-fashioned wainscoted room; the panels ornamented³ with festoons of flowers carved in wood; with an oaken floor, a well-worn Turkey carpet, and dark mahogany furniture, all of which had seen service and polish under Pebbleson Nephew.  The great sideboard had assisted at many business-dinners given by Pebbleson Nephew to their connection, on the principle of throwing sprats overboard to catch whales; and Pebbleson Nephew’s comprehensive three-sided plate-warmer, made to fit the whole front of the large fireplace, kept watch beneath it over a sarcophagus-shaped cellaret that had in its time held many a dozen of Pebbleson Nephew’s wine.  But the little rubicund⁴ old bachelor with a pigtail, whose portrait was over the sideboard (and who could easily be identified as decidedly Pebbleson and decidedly not Nephew), had retired⁵ into another sarcophagus, and the plate-warmer had grown as cold as he.  So, the golden and black griffins that supported the candelabra, with black balls in their mouths at the end of gilded⁶ chains, looked as if in their old age they had lost all heart for playing at ball, and were dolefully exhibiting their chains in the Missionary⁷ line of inquiry⁸, whether they had not earned emancipation⁹ by this time, and were not griffins and brothers.

Such a Columbus of a morning was the summer morning, that it discovered Cripple Corner.  The light and warmth pierced in at the open windows, and irradiated the picture of a lady hanging over the chimney-piece, the only other decoration of the walls.

“My mother at five-and-twenty,” said Mr. Wilding to himself, as his eyes enthusiastically followed the light to the portrait’s face, “I hang up here, in order that visitors may admire my mother in the bloom of her youth and beauty.  My mother at fifty I hang in the

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