of Europe, in
one of which he died. His wife and daughter were meantime supported
by the contributions of Mrs. Jemima Biggs, who still kept the
ladies'-school.
At last a dear old relative--such a one as one reads of in romances--died
and left seven thousand pounds apiece to the two sisters, whereupon the
elder gave up schooling and retired to London; and the younger
managed to live with some comfort and decency at Brussels, upon two
hundred and ten pounds per annum. Mrs. Gorgon never touched a
shilling of her capital, for the very good reason that it was placed
entirely out of her reach; so that when she died, her daughter found
herself in possession of a sum of money that is not always to be met
with in this world.
Her aunt the baronet's lady, and her aunt the ex-schoolmistress, both
wrote very pressing invitations to her, and she resided with each for six
months after her arrival in England. Now, for a second time, she had
come to Mrs. Biggs, Caroline Place, Mecklenburgh Square. It was
under the roof of that respectable old lady that John Perkins, Esquire,
being invited to take tea, wooed and won Miss Gorgon.
Having thus described the circumstances of Miss Gorgon's life, let us
pass for a moment from that young lady, and lift up the veil of mystery
which envelopes the deeds and character of Perkins.
Perkins, too, was an orphan; and he and his Lucy, of summer evenings,
when Sol descending lingered fondly yet about the minarets of the
Foundling, and gilded the grassplots of Mecklenburgh Square--Perkins,
I say, and Lucy would often sit together in the summer-house of that
pleasure-ground, and muse upon the strange coincidences of their life.
Lucy was motherless and fatherless; so too was Perkins. If Perkins was
brotherless and sisterless, was not Lucy likewise an only child? Perkins
was twenty-three: his age and Lucy's united, amounted to forty-six; and
it was to be remarked, as a fact still more extraordinary, that while
Lucy's relatives were AUNTS, John's were UNCLES. Mysterious spirit
of love! let us treat thee with respect and whisper not too many of thy
secrets. The fact is, John and Lucy were a pair of fools (as every young
couple OUGHT to be who have hearts that are worth a farthing), and
were ready to find coincidences, sympathies, hidden gushes of feeling,
mystic unions of the soul, and what not, in every single circumstance
that occurred from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, and
in the intervals. Bedford Row, where Perkins lived, is not very far from
Mecklenburgh Square; and John used to say that he felt a comfort that
his house and Lucy's were served by the same muffin-man.
Further comment is needless. A more honest, simple, clever,
warm-hearted, soft, whimsical, romantical, high-spirited young fellow
than John Perkins did not exist. When his father, Doctor Perkins, died,
this, his only son, was placed under the care of John Perkins, Esquire,
of the house of Perkins, Scully, and Perkins, those celebrated attorneys
in the trading town of Oldborough, which the second partner, William
Pitt Scully, Esquire, represented in Parliament and in London.
All John's fortune was the house in Bedford Row, which, at his father's
death, was let out into chambers, and brought in a clear hundred a year.
Under his uncle's roof at Oldborough, where he lived with thirteen
red-haired male and female cousins, he was only charged fifty pounds
for board, clothes, and pocket-money, and the remainder of his rents
was carefully put by for him until his majority. When he approached
that period--when he came to belong to two spouting-clubs at
Oldborough, among the young merchants and lawyers'-clerks--to blow
the flute nicely, and play a good game at billiards--to have written one
or two smart things in the Oldborough Sentinel--to be fond of smoking
(in which act he was discovered by his fainting aunt at three o'clock
one morning)--in one word, when John Perkins arrived at manhood, he
discovered that he was quite unfit to be an attorney, that he detested all
the ways of his uncle's stern, dull, vulgar, regular, red-headed family,
and he vowed that he would go to London and make his fortune.
Thither he went, his aunt and cousins, who were all "serious," vowing
that he was a lost boy; and when his history opens, John had been two
years in the metropolis, inhabiting his own garrets; and a very nice
compact set of apartments, looking into the back-garden, at this
moment falling vacant, the prudent Lucy Gorgon had visited them, and
vowed that she and her John should there commence housekeeping.
All these explanations are tedious, but necessary; and furthermore, it
must be said, that as John's uncle's partner was the Liberal member
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