 the loving kind. That amiable virgin, having clung to the
skirts of the Law from her earliest youth; having sustained herself by their
aid, as it were, in her first running alone, and maintained a firm grasp upon
them ever since; had passed her life in a kind of legal childhood. She had been
remarkable, when a tender prattler, for an uncommon talent in counterfeiting the
walk and manner of a bailiff: in which character she had learned to tap her
little playfellows on the shoulder, and to carry them off to imaginary
sponging-houses, with a correctness of imitation which was the surprise and
delight of all who witnessed her performances, and which was only to be exceeded
by her exquisite manner of putting an execution into her doll's house, and
taking an exact inventory of the chairs and tables. These artless sports had
naturally soothed and cheered the decline of her widowed father: a most
exemplary gentleman, (called old Foxey by his friends from his extreme
sagacity,) who encouraged them to the utmost, and whose chief regret, on finding
that he drew near to Houndsditch churchyard, was, that his daughter could not
take out an attorney's certificate and hold a place upon the roll. Filled with
this affectionate and touching sorrow, he had solemnly confided her to his son
Sampson as an invaluable auxiliary; and from the old gentleman's decease to the
period of which we treat, Miss Sally Brass had been the prop and pillar of his
business.
    It is obvious that, having devoted herself from infancy to this one pursuit
and study, Miss Brass could know but little of the world, otherwise than in
connection with the law; and that from a lady gifted with such high tastes,
proficiency in those gentler and softer arts in which women usually excel, was
scarcely to be looked for. Miss Sally's accomplishments were all of a masculine
and strictly legal kind. They began with the practice of an attorney and they
ended with it. She was in a state of lawful innocence, so to speak. The law had
been her nurse. And, as bandy-legs or such physical deformities in children are
held to be the consequence of bad nursing, so, if in a mind so beautiful any
moral twist or bandiness could be found, Miss Sally Brass's nurse was alone to
blame.
    It was on this lady, then, that Mr. Swiveller burst in full freshness as
something new and hitherto undreamed of, lighting up the office with scraps of
song and merriment, conjuring with inkstands and boxes of wafers, catching three
oranges in
