The battle of life

by A. L. O. E.

"I want to see Justice Burns. I'm the nephew of his late butler, and he has money of mine in his hands."

"Ah! You're the nephew of poor old Carey, are you?" said the footman, relaxing into an easy sociable manner. "Come in and sit down in the hall. You can't see master yet, for he's taking his breakfast."

As John entered the hall, he might have guessed that a meal was going on in the house, from the very savoury scent which proceeded out of the dining-room.

"Breakfast! Why it's nigh noonday!" cried honest John, who had already taken his dinner, "It's plain the Justice ain't up with the lark."

"You wouldn't be up with the lark neither, if you had such nights as he has," said the servant, who was inclined for a gossip. "The Justice is a martyr to gout—suffers misery, he does, and makes every one about him miserable too, I suppose to keep him company."

"I should say his gout doesn't take away his appetite," observed John, glancing at a steaming dish which the butler was carrying in at that moment to his master.

The footman shrugged his shoulders. "There's the mischief," said he. "The more the Justice suffers, the more he eats; the more he eats, the more he suffers; but he can't do without his turtle and venison, his sauces and wines. Doctor and cook, he keeps both of them at work. I'd not have such legs as he has for ten thousand pounds a year; they're swelled as big as two, and he can hardly get up from his chair; we've to wheel him from one room to another."

"'Twould have been better, maybe, for the Justice if he'd had to follow the plough at sunrise, and get a good appetite for his bread and cheese," observed John, glancing down with some satisfaction at his own active powerful limbs, that had never suffered from an hour's disease.

"Oh! I often say that it would have been a good thing for him, if he'd had to work hard for his bread, clip hedges or break stones on the road," said the talkative footman. "But there's his bell, I must answer it at once, for he's mighty easily put out when a fit of the gout is upon him."

"Well, maybe hard cash, even a great deal of it, is not always a blessing," was the thought which John Carey had leisure to turn well over in his mind during the half-hour which he had to wait while the Justice was eating and drinking in misery and pain, wasting on gluttonous indulgence that money for which he would one day have to render a strict account.