"Hang the fellow," thought Frank, "it is the very look, the same malicious leer, with which a graceless urchin views the bird just limed, doubting if he shall keep the pretty trembler caged, or twist its little neck."

Peter hurried on, and, having arrived at the far end, opened the narrow door, and holding up the candle, exhibited the bed within. Frank stood confounded with astonishment! a second thought, however, seemed to set the matter right.

"What! you are showing me your own room, Peter! I suppose my Uncle places you here, as a guard upon the property?"

"A guard!"—and the fellow, smiling, showed his teeth in silent derision. "A guard!-No, Sir, Master knows better ;if so be that thieves got on the wrong side of these locks, whoever slept here would be little baulk!-I guess, they'd just slit his gullet, and leave him to whistle through the hole! This room be yourn, Sir." "This! this infernal kennel!"

"Kennel!'- Lord love ye,- Master says that every dog knows his own,'-you called it 'my place' just now, Sir! Master snug as a wren's nest. Ay, ay, he's

says it's

all for feeling, and cares no more for look, than a beggarman for woollen rags in summer! You'll find warm bedding, and all bran new, I guess, Sir. A kennel!"- And still muttering 'kennel!' and coughing, away went Peter, leaving Frank to his own conclusions.

The inside of the "wren's nest" was little better than the out. Some of the conveniences of the toilet were there, indeed, but the low oaken bedstead was without hangings, and though the high window was glazed, (the others in the flat were open gratings,) it had neither blind nor curtain. Still Peter was right in the essential article of "feeling; the bed was capital, and Frank soon fell asleep.

In the faculty of sleeping soundly, few could excel Frank Blandford, but now he was sadly at fault; whether it were from the recent whirl of travel, or that the scent of the pimento, large stores of which, with other spices, lay in the adjoining flat; was it this

or that, Frank dreamt more than a love-sick maiden who sleeps with a mutton shank beneath her pillow.

Under the wand of Morpheus, he was again at Oxford, in the midst of a glorious jollification, given in celebration of his own departure. Wit and claret were in the ascendant, when just as his old chum, the Hon. Bob Langton, gave a mock oration to his especial honour, and dashed it here and there with sundry little anecdotes, that at last provoked a general burst of the old song,

"Green grow the rushes O!"

the scene changed, suddenly as the glancing of a falling star, and Frank was following his poor Father's funeral in the West Indies, where he had never been.

The other mourners, or mummers, for, as is too usual on such occasions, the first word was a sad misnomer, were talking ribaldry, and smoking as they sauntered forward, when,

just as the black half-naked grave-diggers received the coffin to lodge it in its narrow cell, the lid fell off, and instead of a pallid festering corpse, out tumbled an endless shower of doubloons. Thousands on thousands, chinking and rattling, they rolled into the grave, its dark sides crumbling with their weight. And then all but himself seemed sinking through a hollow void of utter darkness, into a viewless bottomless abyss ;-and Frank felt his heart swell, and his brain grow dizzy, for a voice as from the air whispered,

"Thou art alone,-penniless, and as a vagabond on the earth."

Then all without and within became confused and indistinct, but still accompanied with a horrible sensation, as if the orbs of sight were pressing back upon the brain. As suddenly, and strangely, rich strains of melody arose; in the dim chaos of the mind, revisitings of light appeared, and as they strengthened, they seemed to reveal the verdant fields