Good fortune now begins to smile upon Amelia. We are glad to get her

out of that low sphere in which she has been creeping hitherto and

introduce her into a polite circle--not so grand and refined as that in

which our other female friend, Mrs. Becky, has appeared, but still

having no small pretensions to gentility and fashion. Jos's friends

were all from the three presidencies, and his new house was in the

comfortable Anglo-Indian district of which Moira Place is the centre.

Minto Square, Great Clive Street, Warren Street, Hastings Street,

Ochterlony Place, Plassy Square, Assaye Terrace ("gardens" was a

felicitous word not applied to stucco houses with asphalt terraces in

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front, so early as 1827)--who does not know these respectable abodes of

the retired Indian aristocracy, and the quarter which Mr. Wenham calls

the Black Hole, in a word? Jos's position in life was not grand enough

to entitle him to a house in Moira Place, where none can live but

retired Members of Council, and partners of Indian firms (who break,

after having settled a hundred thousand pounds on their wives, and

retire into comparative penury to a country place and four thousand a

year); he engaged a comfortable house of a second- or third-rate order

in Gillespie Street, purchasing the carpets, costly mirrors, and

handsome and appropriate planned furniture by Seddons from the

assignees of Mr. Scape, lately admitted partner into the great Calcutta

House of Fogle, Fake, and Cracksman, in which poor Scape had embarked

seventy thousand pounds, the earnings of a long and honourable life,

taking Fake's place, who retired to a princely park in Sussex (the

Fogles have been long out of the firm, and Sir Horace Fogle is about to

be raised to the peerage as Baron Bandanna)--admitted, I say, partner

into the great agency house of Fogle and Fake two years before it

failed for a million and plunged half the Indian public into misery and

ruin.

Scape, ruined, honest, and broken-hearted at sixty-five years of age,

went out to Calcutta to wind up the affairs of the house. Walter Scape

was withdrawn from Eton and put into a merchant's house. Florence

Scape, Fanny Scape, and their mother faded away to Boulogne, and will

be heard of no more. To be brief, Jos stepped in and bought their

carpets and sideboards and admired himself in the mirrors which had

reflected their kind handsome faces. The Scape tradesmen, all

honourably paid, left their cards, and were eager to supply the new

household. The large men in white waistcoats who waited at Scape's

dinners, greengrocers, bank-porters, and milkmen in their private

capacity, left their addresses and ingratiated themselves with the

butler. Mr. Chummy, the chimney-purifier, who had swept the last three

families, tried to coax the butler and the boy under him, whose duty it

was to go out covered with buttons and with stripes down his trousers,

for the protection of Mrs. Amelia whenever she chose to walk abroad.




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