coarse-featured wretches, whose progenitors have for centuries been reared in poverty.

The father had been a thoughtless, indolent, reckless man, who never once cared to redeem the fortunes of his house. He married early, had a numerous family, and O'Connor was his youngest child. The estate had been encumbered during the tenure of no less than three of his predecessors, and the incubus which hung over it like a gathering cloud, only became greater, instead of smaller, as years wore away. The inheritance had become an inheritance more in name than in reality, and when the mortgage interest was deducted from the uncertain rental of a small and impoverished tenantry, the surplus income was, indeed, inconsiderable. O'Connor's eldest brother, who now represented this fast falling house, was one of those hare-brained, rattling, neck-or-nothing fellows, who in heedless unreflectiveness, live but for the day—think of no future-nor care for any save themselves. It is true he was attached to O'Connor, and as the younger had spent

years at the Dublin University, the elder determined he should accompany himself to London, whither he had now determined in the main to reside; and he made him a trifling allowance, till some good thing turned up worthy of acceptance.

Being connected with several of the leading families in the West of Ireland, and both being light-hearted, jovial, taking men, they had little difficulty in gaining the entrée to the best circles; and it was in the vicinity of St. James's, at the fashionable reception of a worldly, and vain-glorious old dowager, where O'Connor first beheld those evil stars, the Count and Squanderfield, who were destined to lure him from the hitherto undeparted path of honour and honesty. Young and careless, credulous and confiding, a stranger to artfulness and guile, full of unbosoming friendship and open ingenuousness, he without hesitation accepted the patronizing acquaintance of these two archdecoyers. They led him with a silken string to vices from which he was not to be backdrawn by a cable, nor were his suspicions

awakened, until he had been conducted into the miz-maze-until their equivocal kind of life, and the fascinations of refined profligacy, had taken such hold upon his tastes, as to render the gaieties and pleasures now so dear to him, in something of the shape of necessaries to his existence. The syren tongue of voluptuous indulgence had led him into the haunts of temptation and guilt, and like that suicidal bird which drinks the crimson current of its own vitality, his sinful passions were feeding on his own destruction. The share of those guilty spoils, which his two friends and himself acquired at the gambling table, he soon began to consider as a more liberal and independent source of revenue, than that derived as a needy supplicant of his brother's embarrassed exchequer.

The wary and specious reasonings of the Count and Squanderfield at first lulled his unreflecting conscience into repose, and it was by imperceptible transitions, that his once noble and undissimulating character became altered and debased. His comely

countenance, with its vivacious sprightliness, and sunlit smiles, his frank and winning manners, and that native, unassumed good humour, rendered him to such intriguers a desirable ally-whilst his education, his talents, his archness, and naïveté made him to anything an adroit accomplice. It was not until he had stained his hands with foul transactions, which, from their very heinousness and darkened complexion he became startled, that he awoke to sensibility. The vortex had been entered, and the continued rounds of dissipation in which such men plunge to forget self, left little time for inward communion-his days were forgotten in the unsobering delirium of intoxicating sinfulness. But a solitary lightning flash had broke in upon the darkness of his soul. The lurid glare of an accusing monition, showed the scene of abandonment into which he had fallen-it had left the traces of misery on his memory-he plunged again into excesses, and it was in this melancholy tone of spirit, in which he joined the card table, to immolate Inglis on the long contemplated pile of their villainy.

When he returned from their victim's bankers, and found himself alone in that obscure, depressing, dismal-hued apartment previously described, self-accusation again broke forth, and his aching recollection recounted crimes which he vainly essayed to dispel. Common sense told him that the course he was pursuing must ere long have an end-that there is an accumulative, a climacteric point in wrongfulness and criminalities, which will inevitably explode and peril the perpetrator. He had been concerned in matters already worthy of ignominious banishment, but, by adroitness and good chances, he and his comates had passed unscathed, and the question naturally presented itself, would such good fortune continually follow his career? In the very nature of fortuitous consequences such could not be expected, hence there was wisdom in fleeing from danger in time.

In this solitary hour of self-reproving meditation, the long frozen current of better feelings burst their icy covering, and he swore by the God in whose presence he now stood, to renounce the scandalous life he of