CHAPTER XXXIII.
NOTHING.
Mr. James Welsh occupied a small, respectable house in a row in Shepherd's Bush. The house was very new; the smell of plaster clung about it. Before the row were young plane trees, surrounded with wire-netting to protect their tender bark from the pen-knives and pinching fingers of boys. Far in the dim future was a prospect of the road becoming an umbrageous avenue; accordingly, with an eye to the future, those who had planned and planted the row entitled it The Avenue.
Up this avenue of wretched, coddled saplings walked Mr. Giles Inglett Saltren, in the best of spirits, to visit his uncle, the Monday morning after his arrival in town.
Now Giles Inglett Saltren was about to begin his career as a journalist, as a politician, as a man of letters. He had broken away from the position which had degraded and enslaved him, which had cramped his genius, and suppressed his generous emotions.
He had not, indeed, heard from Welsh since he had written to him, but youth is sanguine. He could rely on his uncle finding him work, and he knew his own abilities were of no ordinary quality. He had essayed his powers on several political questions. He had written articles on the Eastern Embroglio, the Madagascar Policy of the French Republic, Port Hamilton, the dispute about the Fisheries,
