preserved? an income must be realised, or how is Mrs. Robinson to make head against the Jenkinses, who have just mounted a carriage; put their man, with unexceptionable calves, into livery, and secured a coachman with a little yellow wig, and a triple row of curls behind it, for all the world like the aristocracy?

Your Stock-Broker manages all this. By his so potent art he lures the specie toward him. With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, he flutters about the Money Market for a score or two of years, and then retires at a premium of a quarter of a million. But when I speak of "your Stock-Broker," I do not mean your formal, careful, business-like, unspeculative fellow, who buys in and sells out to order; who receives directions from his agricultural friend in the country, to invest a thousand or two for him in the Three-and-a-Halfs, the crops being so bad, and the price of corn not much above seventy; and who attends the old lady, from Kennington, once a quarter, to guide her hand whilst she signs the books, and to satisfy her queries respecting the sponge, and whether "those wicked Radicals" really do intend to wipe off the National Debt, as they threaten? It is true, this cautious individual is sometimes bitten by a crazy maggot, and ventures a little in Exchequer Bills, and nibbles at Tontine Debentures; and will buy a reversion, if the physician has really shaken his head every day, during the last fortnight, at your asthmatic uncle: but he is plaguy prudent. He does not buy a pig in a poke; he must see the suckling, and determine whether he is real dairyfed. He looks before he leaps, and he looks a long while, and makes a small skip of it, after all; and if he can but get a paring off a slice of a loan, he goes home by the omnibus to his box at Clapton, waters his geraniums in the fore-court; and really thinks Mrs. Brown was quite right the other day-there is room for a small coach-house and stable.

Your real, bona fide Stock-Broker is a different class of being. To him the various turns of fate below are important only as they affect the turns of the market. He is solicitous about the funds which he never sees, and which he has nothing directly to do with; and he can tell the price of Consols to an eighth, at any given minute in the day.

The Stock-Broker is either a Bull or a Bear-fanciful designations! Would you fain know, dear uninitiated reader, why he is thus playfully and zoologically ranged? It is the nature of the bull to toss-for proof, look up and see yon retributive drover in the air! it is the nature of the bear to pull "with downward drag austere" -witness the fate of Antigonus, in "The Winter's Tale," as related

The

by the Clown. "Will that humour pass?" as Nym says. Bull, then, speculates upon a rise in stocks-the Bear upon a fall. But should the Bull get his horns entangled, or the Bear singe his paws, while he is endeavouring to make himself warm, he is forthwith transformed; or, as Peter Quince currently reported of Bully Bottom, he is "translated" into one of your tame villatic fowl; and a fowl, too, with an unhappy disqualification in one of its legs: in other words, he becomes "a lame duck." Some, with more love of metaphor than of ornithology, term him a waddler. Should any one be curious enough to wish to see either these Bulls, or these Bears, let him by no means enter their den in Capel Court, Bartholomew Lane. Lack of sedentary employment renders them sportive and frolicsome, and the prevailing humour pervades both old and young. They are all wags of the first water-practical Joe Millers. If kicking a stranger's hat about the Exchange were pleasant badinage, or unceremoniously shouldering the intruder, were agreeable banter, they might pass for wits. As it is, they are great in physical repartee; full of animal spirits-manual Sheridans. But, if he will plant himself near the west-end of Bank Buildings, he may see some of the lay-brothers of the establishment (who are not members of the Stock Exchange) rushing to consult the Consol-thermometer, hung forth at the house at the corner; and if the financial Mercury be high or low, as the case may happen, he will hear the Bull roar, and the Bear growl, to his heart's content.

Many is the luckless wight who has driven his hogs to this fine market. He has taken good care beforehand to soap their tails, and to put them upon their mettle; and it is astonishing how well they contrive to elude his fingers. The devil a bristle does he ever see of the herd again. For instance, there was Parsons, the button-maker, of Cannon Street, whom we knew well. Fortune had favoured Parsons: that is to say, after thirty years' screwing and scraping, he had got together about ten thousand pounds. He thought of retirement, and Muswell Hill. The very place the spot of all others, a terrestrial Paradise, without any fear of the serpent (the palings were too high for that)-had been chosen and approved, as he emphatically said, "at home." In hapless hour, Parsons turned an eye-both eyes to the Stock Market.

Be it known, that Parsons had been for thirty years a locomotive clock that never required to be wound up. You might tell the hour by him, the minute: his outgoings and incomings, his risings and sittings, were invariable. But he now became volatile, transitive, discrepant-a breathing enigma. His wife he himself endearingly

called her his "old woman"-could not make him out at all. "Drat the man! what was he after? running in and out, and out and in, like a dog in a dancing school. His top-story wanted repair; he was damaged in the upper works!" And so it fell out. Cards will beat their makers. Fortune's wheel revolves with more than railroad rapidity; and stocks will fluctuate, and people will never nick the right minute. "Heigho! the wind and the rain." The one fell upon, and the other whistled round, a very different tenement (in which poor Parsons breathed his last) from the snug little villa at Muswell Hill. He died before the new act came into operation. And now it behoves us to furnish a brief account of the worthy gentleman whose "picture in little" lies before us. Gregory Grayson cannot, we believe, boast of an illustrious descent; and, if he could, we do not think he would be inclined to do so. His ancestor might have come in with the Conqueror, but, if he did, he came incog. The truth is, Grayson's sire was a ticket-porter, and his mother cleaned out the office of old Perkins, the Stock-Broker, whose father had been swamped in the frightful burst of the South Sea Bubble. Old Perkins was wont to term it "Bubble and Squeak.”

The unimpeachable manner in which young Gregory cleaned the shoes of Perkins, probably suggested to the latter that the lad might be made admirably fitted to step into them. He conceived an affection for him, raised him to the stool, taught his young idea how to dabble; and finally died, leaving him the whole of his property-no trifle, I'll warrant you. Long before this last event took place, however, Gregory Grayson had become an adept in the art and mystery of stock-broking, and so he went on, mending and improving,

""Till old Experience did attain

To something like prophetic strain."

He is now warm-very warm; some call him red-hot.

You might

be fifty thousand out in a guess as to what he is worth, and name a high figure too.

Be so kind, good reader, as to cast your eye upon Gregory Grayson. He is said to bear some resemblance to Old Perkins. It has been whispered-originally in confidence, no doubt, or the thing would never have been so rife that Perkins was really-no matter. The hat do you mark the adjustment of it?—is a direct plagiarism from his former master; the frill is very Perkins. But times are changed. Perkins existed in the upper part of a dark house in Birchin Lane, with a back view of the churchyard in which he lies, and spent his evenings at Toms' Coffee House. Grayson

lives in Woburn Place; gives, and goes out to, good dinners, and intends, no doubt, to rest his bones in one of the best vaults of the Bayswater Cemetery. We know he is a large shareholder in one of those recent memento mori specs. He facetiously designates his shares post obits.

Who knows-Gregory Grayson is not the man to care if all the world knew that he married the daughter of the laundress who brought home his linen every Saturday night, with a little mis-spelt bill, receipted, it would seem, with a skewer? Mrs. Grayson once had personal requisites of no mean order, and is now as handsome as fifty-five will permit her to be; and, really, she is very much of a lady; much more of it than many who have been born, but appear never to have been bred, to it. And the two Misses Grayson are, in our opinion, charming girls, who can talk of poetry and Bellini "Shakspere and the musical glasses," as well as the best brace of Misses in the parish of Bloomsbury. They were once mistaken, in the dress circle, for the Honourable Misses Somebody; we forget the name, but we have heard the story told a hundred times in Woburn Place: it is a great favourite with Mrs. Grayson.

It is more easy to exemplify the character of Gregory Grayson than to describe it. One morning, he was seated in his office, in Warnford Court, " doing a little bit of retrospective," as his friend Larkins would have said, when that gentleman himself made his appearance. Mr. Larkins was one of those individuals who make it their business to attend to the business of other people, and whose pleasure it is to look upon everything as a joke.

"Caught you in a whitey-brown study, I see," said he. "Not at all," replied Grayson.

"Have you heard anything about Tom Beccles?" asked the other. "No. I have only this moment got here. What of him?" "Oh! flown-gone-off! Ha! ha! how you look; gone without bidding any of us good-bye, I assure you.'

Mr. Grayson ejected a piercing whistle: "Who told you this?" "Friend Bradbury," said Larkins. "Settling day to-morrow, you know, and it was far from Tom's wish to settle. As he can't pay all the difference, he prefers paying none; ah! ah! But I guess, by the length of your phiz, he has let you in-eh? come, that's devilish good, 'pon my honour;" and Larkins grinned with the zest of a man who knows he has a good thing all to himself.

Grayson's face was certainly at a considerable discount, at this intelligence. "But Beccles has property?" he said, in a slightly impaired tone.

IT

"All settled, it seems, upon his wife, some months since," said Larkins, coolly. "Tom considers it a sacred duty to take care of his wife and family; he has said as much, and so the devil a rap will be got out of him."

"The scoundrel!" muttered Gregory.

"What's the figure?" asked Larkins, with an air of indifference -" to what tune?"

"About fifteen hundred-rather more," groaned Gregory, as he returned his book to his pocket, after ruefully gazing at it for some minutes.

"Sweet-very sweet," remarked the other. "Guess what the sly dog has done. Bradbury tells me he has lately discovered a dubious brother's imaginary widow with a huge supposititious offspring, and has resuscitated a helpless grandmother to keep them company; so that, you see, he has claims upon him. A pity they didn't turn up before he made so many bargains."

"I'll learn more about this," said Grayson, snatching his hat from the desk with unwonted fierceness.

"By the bye," said Larkins, taking his arm, "I saw you looking at a play-bill yesterday."

"Yes, yes, I believe I did," replied Grayson impatiently; "my girls wish to see the new play at Covent Garden."

"You never bet, I think?" inquired his friend.

"Never!"

"Sometimes at whist," returned Larkins, "I have seen you. I'll tell you what; I've taken fifty to thirty with Lightly, that 'The Garden' doesn't do so well as 'The Lane' this season, if 'The Lane' gets the Cherokees, and concludes an engagement with the three White Elephants from Siam. Shakspeare can't stand against the Cherokee War-dance, and the White Elephants.

"D" Gregory was about to say "Shakspeare;"--but he checked himself, and bestowed his malediction upon the Cherokees and the White Elephants, to be divided equally amongst them. "Good bye, I'm very busy now ;" and he hurried from his imperturbable tormentor.

Grayson had a large fund of philosophy, but unhappily, with mistaken generosity, he reserved the whole of it for the misfortunes of his friends, never drawing out the smallest portion of it for his own use. He was, so to speak, 'in a devil of a way' all the morning, and walked home, at four o'clock, with a particularly bad opinion of mankind in general, and of the individual hight Beccles, in particular. The man at the crossing, in Bloomsbury Square, saw afar off