MR. WRAY'S CASH-BOX. CHAPTER I. ELOCUTION FOR THE MILLION. I SHOULD be insulting the intelligence of readers generally, if I thought it at all necessary to describe to them that widely-celebrated town, Tidbury-on-theMarsh. As a genteel provincial residence, who is unacquainted with it? The magnificent new Hotel that has grown on to the side of the old Inn; the extensive Library, to which, not satisfied with only adding new books, they are now adding a new entrance as well; the projected Crescent of palatial abodes in the Grecian style, on the top of the hill, to rival the completed Crescent of castellated abodes, in the Gothic style, at the bottom of the hill-are not B such local objects as these perfectly well known to any intelligent Englishman? Of course they are! The question is superfluous. Let us get on at once, without wasting more time, from Tidbury in general to the High Street in particular, and to our present destination there-the commercial establishment of Messrs. Dunball and Dark. Looking merely at the coloured liquids, the miniature statue of a horse, the corn-plasters, the oil-skin bags, the pots of cosmetics, and the cut-glass saucers full of lozenges in the shop-window, you might at first imagine that Dunball and Dark were only chemists. Looking carefully through the entrance, towards an inner apartment, an inscription; a large, upright, mahogany receptacle, or box, with a hole in it; brass rails protecting the hole; a green curtain ready to draw over the hole ; and a man with a copper money-shovel in his hand, partially visible behind the hole; would be sufficient to inform you that Dunball and Dark were not chemists only, but "Branch Bankers as well. It is a rough squally morning at the end of November. Mr. Dunball (in the absence of Mr. Dark, who has gone to make a speech at the Vestry Meeting) has got into the mahogany box, and has assumed the whole business and direction of the Branch Bank. He is a very fat man, and looks absurdly over large for his sphere of action. Not a single customer has, as yet, applied for money— nobody has come even to gossip with the Branch Banker through the brass rails of his commercial prison-house. There he sits, staring calmly through the chemical part of the shop into the street-his gold in one drawer, his notes in another, his elbows on his ledgers, his copper shovel under his thumb; the picture of monied loneliness; the hermit of British finance. In the outer shop is the young assistant, ready to drug the public at a moment's notice. But Tidburyon-the-Marsh is an unprofitably healthy place; and no public appears. By the time the young assistant has ascertained from the shop clock that it is a quarter past ten, and from the weather-cock opposite that the wind is "Sou'-sou'-west," he has exhausted all external sources of amusement, and is reduced to occupying himself by first sharpening his penknife, and then cutting his nails. He has com pleted his left hand, and has just begun on the right hand thumb, when a customer actually darkens the shop-door at last! Mr. Dunball starts, and grasps the copper shovel : the young assistant shuts up his pen-knife in a hurry, and makes a bow. The customer is a young girl, and she has come for a pot of lip-salve. She is very neatly and quietly dressed; looks about eighteen or nineteen years of age; and has something in her face which I can only characterise by the epithet-loveable. There is a beauty of innocence and purity about her forehead, brow, and eyes-a calm, kind, happy expression as she looks at you-and a curious home-sound in her clear utterance when she speaks, which, altogether, make you fancy, stranger as you are, that you must have known her and loved her long ago, and somehow or other ungratefully forgotten her in the lapse of time. Mixed up, however, with the girlish gentleness and innocence which form her more prominent charm, there is a look of firmness-especially noticeable about the expression of her lips-that gives a certain character and originality to her face. Her figure I stop at her figure. Not by any means for want of phrases to describe it; but from a disheartening conviction of the powerlessness of any description of her at all to produce the right effect on the minds of others. If I were asked in what particular efforts of literature the poverty of literary material most remarkably appears, I should answer, in personal descriptions of heroines. We have all read these by the hundred-some of them so carefully and finely finished, that we are not only informed about the lady's eyes, eyebrows, nose, cheeks, complexion, mouth, teeth, neck, ears, head, hair, and the way it was dressed; but are also made acquainted with the particular manner in which the sentiments below made the bosom above heave or swell; besides the exact position of head in which her eyelashes were just long enough to cast a shadow on her cheeks. We have read all this attentively and admiringly, as it deserves; and have yet risen from the reading, without the remotest approach to a realisation in our |