Solomon Flint, being a man of letters, was naturally a hard-working man. By night and by day did that faithful servant of his Queen and country tramp through the streets of London with the letters of the lieges in his care. The dim twilight of early morning found him poking about, like a solitary ghoul, disembowelling the pillar posts. The rising sun sent a deflected ray from chimney-pot or steeple to welcome him—when fog and smoke permitted. The noon-tide beams broiled him in summer and cheered him in winter on his benignant path of usefulness. The evening fogs and glimmering lamps beheld him hard at work, and the nightly returning stars winked at him with evident surprise when they found him still fagging along through heat and cold, rain and snow, with the sense of urgent duty ever present in his breast, and part of the recorded hopes, joys, fears, sorrows, loves, hates, business, and humbug of the world in his bag.

 

Besides being a hard-working man, Solomon Flint was a public man, and a man of note. In the district of London which he frequented, thousands of the public watched for him, wished for him, even longed for him, and received him gladly. Young eyes sometimes sparkled and old eyes sometimes brightened when his well-known uniform appeared. Footmen opened to him with good-will, and servant-girls with smiles. Even in the low neighbourhoods of his district—and he traversed several such—Solomon was regarded with favour. His person was as sacred as that of a detective or a city missionary. Men who scowled on the world at large gave a familiar nod to him, and women who sometimes desired to tear off people’s scalps never displayed the slightest wish to damage a hair of the postman’s head. He moved about, in fact, like a benign influence, distributing favours and doing good wherever he went. May it not be said truly that in the spiritual world we have a good many news-bearers of a similar stamp? Are not the loving, the gentle, the self-sacrificing such?—in a word, the Christ-like, who, if they do not carry letters about, are themselves living epistles “known and read of all men?”

 

One of the low districts through which Solomon Flint had to pass daily embraced the dirty court in which Abel Bones dwelt. Anticipating a very different fate for it, no doubt, the builder of this region had named it Archangel Court.

 

As he passed rapidly through it Solomon observed a phenomenon by no means unusual in London and elsewhere, namely, a very small girl taking charge of an uncommonly large baby. Urgent though his duties were, Solomon would have been more than human if he had not stopped to observe the little girl attempt the apparently impossible feat of lifting the frolicsome mass of fat which was obviously in a rebellious state of mind. Solomon had occasionally seen the little girl in his rounds, but never before in possession of a baby. She grasped him round the waist, which her little arms could barely encircle, and, making a mighty effort, got the rebel on his legs. A second heave placed him on her knees, and a third effort, worthy of a gymnast, threw him on her little bosom. She had to lean dangerously far back to keep him there, and being incapable of seeing before her, owing to the bulk of her burden, was compelled to direct her course by faith. She knew the court well, however, and was progressing favourably, when a loose stone tripped her and she fell. Not having far to fall, neither she nor the baby was the worse for it.

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