“But punch, my dear Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, tasting it, “like time and tide, waits for no man. Ah! it is at the present moment in high flavour. My love, will you give me your opinion?”

Mrs. Micawber pronounced it excellent.

“Then I will drink,” said Mr. Micawber, “if my friend Copperfield will permit me to take that social liberty, to the days when my friend Copperfield and myself were younger, and fought our way in the world side by side. I may say, of myself and Copperfield, in words we have sung together before now, that

We twa hae run about the braes And pu’d the gowans fine

—in a figurative point of view—on several occasions. I am not exactly aware,” said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll in his voice, and the old indescribable air of saying something genteel, “what gowans may be, but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken a pull at them, if it had been feasible.”

Mr. Micawber, at the then present moment, took a pull at his punch. So we all did: Traddles evidently lost in wondering at what distant time Mr. Micawber and I could possibly have been comrades in the battle of the world.

“Ahem!” said Mr. Micawber, clearing his throat, and warming with the punch and with the fire. “My dear, another glass?”

Mrs. Micawber said it must be very little, but we couldn’t allow that, so it was a glassful.

“As we are quite confidential here, Mr. Copperfield,” said Mrs. Micawber, sipping her punch, “Mr. Traddles being a part of our domesticity, I should much like to have your opinion on Mr. Micawber’s prospects. For corn,” said Mrs. Micawber argumentatively, “as I have repeatedly said to Mr. Micawber, may be gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative. Commission to the extent of two and ninepence in a fortnight cannot, however limited our ideas, be considered remunerative.”

We were all agreed upon that.

“Then,” said Mrs. Micawber, who prided herself on taking a clear view of things, and keeping Mr. Micawber straight by her woman’s wisdom, when he might otherwise go a little crooked, “then I ask myself this question. If corn is not to be relied upon, what is? Are coals to be relied upon? Not at all. We have turned our attention to that experiment, on the suggestion of my family, and we find it fallacious.”

Mr. Micawber, leaning back in his chair, with his hands in his pockets, eyed us aside, and nodded his head, as much as to say that the case was very clearly put.

“The articles of corn and coals,” said Mrs. Micawber, still more argumentatively, “being equally out of the question, Mr. Copperfield, I naturally look round the world, and say, ‘What is there in which a person of Mr. Micawber’s talent is likely to succeed?’ And I exclude the doing anything on commission, because commission is not a certainty. What is best suited to a person of Mr. Micawber’s peculiar temperament is, I am convinced, a certainty.”

Traddles and I both expressed, by a feeling murmur, that this great discovery was no doubt true of Mr. Micawber, and that it did him much credit.

“I will not conceal from you, my dear Mr. Copperfield,” said Mrs. Micawber, “that I have long felt the Brewing business to be particularly adapted to Mr. Micawber. Look at Barclay and Perkins! Look at Truman, Hanbury, and Buxton! It is on that extensive footing that Mr. Micawber, I know from my own knowledge of him, is calculated to shine; and the profits, I am told, are e-nor—mous! But if Mr. Micawber cannot get into those firms—which decline to answer his letters, when he offers his services even in an