who know no incantations but those of common
sense, and whose help are purchased by honest
work alone.

A FOREIGN CONTRACT

Experience seems to have no effect upon
the hardy and adventurous nature of the
British capitalist. His reliance on his shrewdness,
his management, his arithmetic, and,
in case of necessity, upon his fists are
unbounded. Very likely he has succeeded
in some dozen public works in England,
and netted a good hundred thousand pounds
by them. When the parish trustees at
Diddleton-super-Mare, assisted by Lawyer
Whitecow, of that town, had a brush with him
about building a new workhouse and
dependencies, he came off triumphantly, his own
solicitors in Thavies Inn, Messrs. Gimblet, Rule,
and Pounder, having sued the said trustees for
damages, and brought them to their senses in
double-quick time. He has a blind reliance on
Messrs. Gimblet, Rule, and Pounder ever
afterwards, and believes that this eminent firm of
solicitors can protect him against all the princes
and potentates of the earth. When fully
impressed with these opinions, certain that two
and two are four—a doctrine he is constantly
propounding—he is quite ripe to be plucked by
the first foreign rogue who is allured by the
freshness and bloom which shine in his frank
countenance. When the fish is hooked and landed
by a foreigner, the struggles begin. The first
thing required of him is to pay the promoters of
the proposed scheme, say a railway in Doomania.
These he will find so numerous that they will
involve him in half a dozen lawsuits at the outset
of the affair. Individuals, with whose very names
he is unacquainted, yet who appear respectable
people not to be pooh-poohed, will file bills in
Chancery against him, claiming previous
contract rights legally assured to them by the
foreign government in question. Messrs.
Gimblet, Rule, and Pounder will inform him
that his opponents are altogether of a
different kidney to Messrs. Burr and Drone with
their legal adviser at Diddleton-super-Mare.
They have now no less than seventeen
firms of eminent London solicitors engaged
against them, and all the leading counsel have
been retained on the other side. Meantime,
the British contractor, true to his multiplication-
table, will not hear of giving up a business
which has already cost him so much; and,
strong in the justice of his cause at first, he
rather enjoys the disappointment of his rivals
and laughs at them and their Chancery suits
together.

All at once, too, he has become a great man.
There are paragraphs about his wealth and
energy in the City articles of the morning
papers. The ambassador of the Doomanian
Principalities refers to him in a flattering
manner at a banquet given by the Right
Honourable the Lord Mayor in the Egyptian
Hall at the Mansion House, where he is held
up as an enlightened merchant-prince of
large views and liberal principles, who desires
to cement the political union of two great
countries by the bonds of commerce. He is
called upon to return thanks when his health is
drunk at various other festive meetings of a
similar character, where, under the influence of
champagne and good cheer, he takes occasion to
relate, for the guidance and instruction of
British youth, his biography and the means by
which he rose in life to his present proud position.
He likes it; so does his wife. Ever since the
paragraph appeared in the morning papers, she
has been inundated by cards and visits from the
most distinguished and affable people. The
Doomanian ambassador has vouchsafed even to
come in his own illustrious representative person
to dinner, and has proposed four of his own
nephews, together with a noble uncle and
brother-in-law, for employment connected with
the new contracts on remunerative terms. Half
a dozen native counts and princes have called
also, and it is a noticeable fact that every one of
the local magnates has got something to sell.
One is the proprietor of a forest, another of a
stone-quarry, a third has a few thousand
peasants to let out on hire. There is no end to
the polite offers of service they make also to the
contractor's wife. All day long liveried footmen
are arriving at Clapham-common with coroneted
notes and presents of game, or nosegays for her
daughters. Foreign nobility are always so
polite, that it is quite a pleasure to correspond
with them upon such cordial and familiar terms;
besides which, Mary Ann and Jemima may
evidently choose whatever title they fancy they
should best adorn when shared in company
with a foreign gentleman of imposing, not to
say bandit-like, exterior.

There is but one slight drawback to these
domestic and social blisses. The enterprising
man who had such trust in his creed that two
and two make four, begins to look rather
haggard and careworn when he comes home to
Clapham of an evening. He has had to pay a
very large amount of caution-money to the
government of Doomania as a guarantee for the
due performance of his contract and completion
of the works he has incautiously undertaken
to execute within a given time. He is, of
course, such an excellent man of business, and
so thoroughly versed in the lessons taught by
arithmetic, that he has locked up all his own
capital, so that not a shilling of it remains idle.
He has had, therefore, to appeal to his bankers
to raise the amount of caution-money required,
and has tendered them his valuable contract as
security.

Strange to say, however, the faith of Messrs.
Bullion and Scrip in the resources of Doomania
and its rulers is strictly limited. They point
out with some abruptness that four princes who
have governed that fertile country within the
last two years, are now in exile; two of them
residing at a coffee-house in Leicester-square,
and two in obscure lodgings at Paris; while
it appears, according to the banker's account,
to be an invariable rule in Doomania for