which Pen would utter the most beautiful sermons ever preached. 

 While these natural sentiments were waging war and trouble in honest Pen’s bosom, it chanced one day that he rode into Chatteris, for the purpose of carrying to the County Chronicle a tremendous and thrilling poem for the next week’s paper; and putting up his horse according to custom, at the stables of the George Hotel there, he fell in with an old acquaintance. A grand black tandem, with scarlet wheels, came rattling into the inn yard, as Pen stood there in converse with the hostler about Rebecca; and the voice of the driver called out, “Hallo, Pendennis, is that you?” in a loud patronising manner. Pen had some difficulty in recognising under the broad-brimmed hat and the vast great-coats and neckcloths, with which the new-comer was habited, the person and figure of his quondam schoolfellow, Mr. Foker. 

 A year’s absence had made no small difference in that gentleman. A youth who had been deservedly whipped a few months previously, and who spent his pocket-money on tarts and hardbake, now appeared before Pen in one of those costumes to which the public consent, that I take to be quite as influential in this respect as ‘Johnson’s Dictionary,’ has awarded the title of “Swell.’ He had a bull-dog between his legs, and in his scarlet shawl neckcloth was a pin representing another bull-dog in gold: he wore a fur waistcoat laced over with gold chains; a green cutaway coat with basket-buttons, and a white upper-coat ornamented with cheese-plate buttons, on each of which was engraved some stirring incident of the road or the chase; all which ornaments set off this young fellow’s figure to such advantage, that you would hesitate to say which character in life he most resembled, and whether he was a boxer en goguette, or a coachman in his gala suit. 

 “Left that place for good, Pendennis?” Mr. Foker said, descending from his landau and giving Pendennis a finger. 

 “Yes, this year—or more,” Pen said. 

 “Beastly old hole,” Mr. Foker remarked. “Hate it. Hate the Doctor: hate Towzer, the second master; hate everybody there. Not a fit place for a gentleman.” 

 “Not at all,” said Pen, with an air of the utmost consequence. 

 “By gad, sir, I sometimes dream, now, that the Doctor’s walking into me,” Foker continued (and Pen smiled as he thought that he himself had likewise fearful dreams of this nature). “When I think of the diet there, by gad, sir, I wonder how I stood it. Mangy mutton, brutal beef; pudding on 

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