It Is Never Too Late to Mend

This last fact I make mine by perambulating a certain great street every three months, and observing how name succeeds to name as wave to wave. Readers hardened by the Times will not perhaps go so far as to weep over a body of traders for being reduced to the average condition of all other traders. But the individual trader, who fights for existence against unfair odds, is to be pitied whether his shop has plate glass or a barn door to it; and he is the more to be pitied when he is sober, intelligent, proud, sensitive, and unlucky. George Fielding was all these, who, a few years ago, assisted by his brother William, filled "The Grove"-as nasty a little farm as any in Berkshire.