I was seated one lovely morning in autumn gazing gloomily into the street, which was as empty as my own exchequer. Dreamy visions of the golden glory of ripening corn, of blood-red poppies, of fern-shaded dells, of limpid pools and purple-clad mountains mocked my aching heart. I sighed the sigh of impecuniosity, and railed at the inconsistency of a fortune which gave little Bangs, who hadn’t one idea to rub against another, a thousand per annum, a vulgar cad like Hopkins a bagful of briefs, and which left me high and dry in a front garret in Eccles Street, without a red cent to come into collision with a battered sixpence in my somewhat cavernous pockets. Heigh-ho!
An outside car, driven at a frosty pace, smote upon the drowsy stillness of the street, and my gloom was somewhat speedily dispelled by the sight of my friend Tom Whiffler’s honest and beaming face, and his expressive and expansive signals while yet a considerable distance from the house. Tom is always full of money, full of health, and full of the most boisterous and explosive spirits.
“Aha! you old cat on the tiles,” he shouted, “come down from your coign of vantage. I was afraid you were out of town. Somebody said you were on Circuit.” And standing upon the foot-board of the car, he burst forth with—
“Hail to our barrister back from the Circuit!
Honor and wealth to the curls of his wig!
Long may he live o’er his forehead to jerk it,
Long at a witness look burly and big!”
“Come up, for gracious sake!” I cried, as I perceived heads peeping from behind the partly-closed shutters of an opposite house, inhabited by a genteel family, who wished their little world to imagine them in Italy, France, Spain—anywhere but in Dublin—during the dog-days.
In a few seconds Tom bounded into the apartment. “This is a slice of luck to get you, old man. Come, now, pack up your traps, and we’ll have four days in the County Wicklow. I shall have the car in any case, and our hotel bills will be mere bagatelles which we’ll square up at Tib’s Eve. Lend me a couple of shirts and things; you can bring the baggage—a change for two—and I’ll do the rest. We’ve twenty-five minutes to catch the train.”
Five minutes found Tom upon one side of the car, myself upon the other, and, calmly reposing in the well between us, the neat little portmanteau of the fair unknown. I was compelled to make use of it, as Whiffler had no “leathern conveniency,” and my travelling-valise had been lent to one of “ours,” and was possibly at that particular moment strapped upon the murderous mound of luggage which encumbers the groaning roof of the Alpine diligence, or snugly ensconced on the grape-strewn deck of a Rhine or a Moselle steamer. It gave me more than a pang to remove it from its well-known corner. A chord had been touched which set all my memories vibrating, and I handled it with as much care and anxiety as though it were a new-born infant or a rickety case containing rack-rent or nitro-glycerine.