gined, given the gent up-stairs a dressing! He said 'I'm a ruined—' he was going to say 'man,' but he stopped short and told me to cut my stick."

"Now, Deputy, I'll bet you a silver crown on that half-suverin when you gets it, that the Count won't put his phiz into this here club for the next three months; and that, before a week goes about, you'll hear my Lord tell half-a-dozen people that business of werry great importance has called Count Puffendoff abroad. Will you take the bet, Deputy-money down, recollect- honour bright?"

"In course I won't do no sich thin'. I've been in this 'ere club five years come time, and I've known the Count bolt twice,—or, as my Lord Squanderfield says, go to the Continent on werry important business; but I'll bet you that 'ere half-suverin, which I knows I shall get, that my Lord and Fitzgerald are here to-day, and every day this week, to put on a brazen face, and make everybody believe they are the most innocent critters living!"

VOL. III.

E

"They won't come though till they knows for certain that their victim has gone,' returned pasty.

"Maybe they won't, but time 'll show. I remember well," sings Dick, and here the colloquy ends, as the two functionaries dart off in different directions, like Ariels driven by the wand of Prospero.

To return for a moment to the little bedroom, and the ruined man taking his tea and toast. Like a restless spirit returned to earth from the regions of despair, what desolation-what misery are pictured in that convulsively working countenance! He is unshaven and untoiletted, his once prided hair is flung in negligent confusion over his brow; his eyes look red and swollen, his tongue is coated and brown, his lips are parched, his hand shakes, and a riving headache threatens to burst each throbbing temple. He has drawn on his pantaloons, and there he sits with folded arms, gnashing his teeth with demon agony! The awful and devilish suggestion will creep into his distracted mind; he starts as the sanguinary

idea again flashes across his brain; he drops powerless again; and-and-hark! he mutters, that self-destruction is the deed of hell! To crimson his hand with his own heart's blood chills him with petrifying fear! A moment's pause.

He comes more to himself, and starting from the bed, declares he will bear the ills he has, rather than flee to others he knows not of! But-alas! for the truthfulness of those conscience-telling words-ruin, ruin, irrevocable ruin! He knows not what to do, whither to fly; the world may be before him, so it was for Cain to till the ground, and Cadmus to be a wanderer. A crowd of self-accusations torture his remembrance; in the spirit of a sordid ambition he had, at the cost of honour and uprightness, won the worship of a human heart, and he had never rightly appreciated the worshipper. In every way which the wrong of a wife could be perpetrated he had been guilty of such delinquencies; he had been cold, for getful, faithless; how can he think of returning to her arms, how can he expect her

sympathy, how hope for her forgiveness? Overcome by such a load of prostrating misery-see how he buries his face in his hands, and moistens his couch with his tears!

Distracted soul, when the "waters of the heart" have freely flowed, and the paroxysms of so much upbraiding, yet not unrepentant anguish have subsided, return to your home, and haply the wife of your bosom will not cast you off, though stained by a thousand pollutions. Remember that woman's spirit is fashioned from the very essentials of forgiveness; that her heart impulsates with tenderness; that her hand is ever ready to apply the soothing unguent to the wounded bosom of her lord; that her love is his heaven gleam when all is cheerless and dark; and that she is the green tendrii that binds up the broken boughs, when the storm, and the lightning, and the thunderbolt, have riven, and shattered, and blasted!

There never was a night so obscure but a straggling moonbeam, or a solitary star, or

even the vivid glare of the lightnings' flash, showed to the belated traveller some devious and rugged path. Never are the onward and the future impenetrable gloom. Depressed, broken-spirited, and in maniac frenzy was Inglis, and, too, suffering from all the languor and feverishness of a last night's debauch; nor had he eaten half the dry toast which Mr. Deputy Dick had carried to him. Yet he arose, dried his tears, and like a "bubbling swimmer in his agony," was ready to catch at a straw. He forgot not that he had made a tremendous speculation in tobacco and cochineal. The chances might turn to his favour, and even yet he might recover his shattered circumstances"and then—and then," said he, "I'll be a better and a wiser man."

He dressed, and ere long descended into that spacious hall, determined to never repass the threshold more, and he had now summoned up within him sufficient of manliness to return to Elleringay, and find in Letitia the consolations of a faithful wife and a

changeless friend.

As he passed towards