I come hither—Good Heavens! if I should catch the perch at last, the occupation of my existence will be gone."
Leonard gazed curiously at the angler, as the last thus mournfully concluded. The ornate turn of his periods did not suit with his costume. He looked woefully threadbare and shabby—a genteel sort of shabbiness too—shabbiness in black. There was humor in the corners of his lip; and his hands, though they did not seem very clean—indeed his occupation was not friendly to such niceties—were those of a man who had not known manual labor. His face was pale and puffed, but the tip of his nose was red. He did not seem as if the watery element was as familiar to himself as to his Dalilah—the perch.
"Such is Life!" recommenced the angler in a moralizing tone, as he slid his rod into its canvas case. "If a man knew what it was to fish all one's life in a stream that has only one perch!—to catch that one perch nine times in all, and nine times to see it fall back into the water, plump;—if a man knew what it was—why, then"—Here the angler looked over his shoulder full at Leonard—"why then, young sir, he would know what human life is to vain ambition. Good evening."
Away he went, treading over the daisies and king cups. Helen's eyes followed him wistfully.
"What a strange person!" said Leonard, laughing.
"I think he is a very wise one," murmured Helen; and she came close up to Leonard, and took his hand in both hers, as if she felt already that he was in need of the Comforter—the line broke, and the perch lost!
CHAPTER IX.
At noon the next day, London stole upon them, through a gloomy, thick, oppressive atmosphere. For where is it that we can say London bursts on the sight? It stole on them through one of its fairest and most gracious avenues of approach—by the stately gardens of Kensington—along the side of Hyde Park, and so on toward Cumberland Gate.
Leonard was not the least struck. And yet, with a very little money, and a very little taste, it would be easy to render this entrance to London as grand and imposing as that to Paris from the Champs Elysées. As they came near the Edgeware Road, Helen took her new brother by the hand and guided him. For she knew all that neighborhood, and she was acquainted with a lodging near that occupied by her father (to that lodging itself she could not have gone for the world), where they might be housed cheaply.
But just then the sky, so dull and overcast since morning, seemed one mass of black cloud. There suddenly came on a violent storm of rain. The boy and girl took refuge in a covered mews, in a street running out of the Edgeware Road. This shelter soon became crowded; the two young pilgrims crept close to the wall, apart