sible speed. The Hibernian complied with Puffendoff's wishes.

very

However paradoxical it may seem, there is such a thing as being in the way and out of the way, that a place may be very near, and to all intents and purposes very far off. It is most unquestionable that there are in the heart and centre of London obscure little squares, winding streets, homogenous, monotonous looking crescents, courts and terraces, which few persons comparatively speaking know even by name, save those who people them, or who vegetate in their immediate localities. A verification of this assertion is afforded in and around Little Britain. Washington Irving has thrown a sort of classical charm over this district, which is bound up with so many by-past associations, and which is actually connected with the present part of our story.

Well then, in or near Little Britain, it matters not which, stood, and we doubt not still stands a sombre, dingy, smoke-begrimed pile of quaintly built houses, whither the reader must be ideally for the brief space transported.

A

To enter. On the second story, that small, badly-lighted sitting-room, and the still more obscure dormitory, with which, through folding doors, it communicates, appear in truth only adapted for dinnerless, dining-out, narrow-incomed bachelors, or pittanced-portioned spinster annuitants. retired excise-officer, a respectably halfstarved naval captain's widow, or some such hermit-living unfortunate might here drag out existence, and even solace him or herself that there were in very truth thousands in the great metropolis worse housed, and only within reach of a less comfortable abode. The sitting-room, it is true, has two bona-fide windows which look into the comparatively out-of-the way and quiet street, but these windows are contracted and quaint in reality, and old-fashioned and historic in their aspect; the wood work is clumsily huge, absurdly substantial; the panes have been scratched and written upon in all directions, and from the gritty, yellowish-green character of the glass it is unquestionable, that since they were placed there great improvements

have taken place in vitreous manufactures. Those two or three dusty, parched-up geraniums, those thick-set pricky cactuses and sickly balsams, appear as if they only on special occasions saw the sun, and were very seldom indulged with the luxury of a genial shower. But they are specimens of vegetable life--kind of typical green things, which to the pent-up denizens of Little Britain, serve emblematically to remind of flowers and fields far away.

The three or four pictures which adorn the shabby papered walls, the faded carpet, antiquated chairs, and as aged tables; and that bilious-hued table cover, indicate in the tout ensemble no very flourishing condition on the part of proprietors or occupants. The confined little bed-room possesses but one window, with a far more dreary and heartdepressing prospect, than into the cooped-up street; and the various articles which go to constitute its furniture and fixtures, though tolerably clean and comfortable, are in precise keeping with those in the aforesaid parlour. Those two or three travelling

trunks, that leather portmanteau, and that shabby military cloak, are, however, unexpected and non-harmonious entities hereand the gold-headed cane, the pair of foils, and the two or three beautifully-executed miniatures, which we had well-nigh unobserved, are scarcely in unison with the associations conjured up by a survey of the divers and diverse objects with which they neighbour. That wrinkled-faced, witchlooking hag, on whose ugliness and wellknit frame, years might be expected to fall for half an age to come, powerless, is bustling about, and full of anxiety lest the fire, which she has not long since lighted, should not burn, or that the smoke, in no very unusual spirit of contradiction with smoke, should puffingly essay to find its exit at the door or window, or any way rather than per viam naturalem, up the chimney.

But who is that fashionably-dressed, sprightly-looking man, with arms folded, eyes riveted in fixity upon the well-worn hearth rug on which he stands, with his back leaned leisurely against the chimney

piece? His lips move quick, and anon are calm, as if at times, some turbulent thought arose to which he gives no tongue. A cloud is on his brow, and a melancholy cast tinges with sadness a countenance, aye most comely in its aspect? But hark! in muttering accents he breaks the silence, and list to his words :

"My father's reckless ways-his improvidence, his extravagance, more, his evil example, are the remote cause of all the sum total of this piecemeal slipping away from honour and honesty. His vices, his pride, his carelessness, make me well-nigh curse his memory! Had he reared his numerous offspring with thrift and watchfulness-had he inculcated in them the cardinal virtuesindustry and self-relying independence-I might not at this moment have been a penniless, a ruined—”

The wheels of a carriage stopped abruptly before the door, and ended his soliloquy. Two gentlemanly-looking men stepped out, nimbly ascended the stairs, and sans ceremonie proceeded to the previously described little sitting-room.