could never realize that quality in it. I remember the scene quite well. Mrs. Horatia sat up in her bed, her hair dishevelled, and her eyelids red and swollen with weeping, her eyes flashing with anger. Although Mrs. Amy continually motioned her, she would not allow me to quit her, but held me tightly by the hand, as if I were her only protector. My uncle sat on a chair near the door, and Mrs. Amy stood leaning on the foot-rail of the bed, looking, to my eyes, twice as tall and as grand as she used to.

I might have seen the beauty of grief and sorrow then, I am sure, if there be any in it, but I only saw two excited women and an old man -he seemed very old to me then, I know-powerless between their passions. I heard my mother, with a hoarse voice, choked with tears and with indignation, and now stayed by sorrow alone, alternately accusing and pleading for my father. I saw Mrs. Heartwell denouncing him like a prosecuting counsel denounces a felon at the bar. I saw nothing of beauty in this misery and sorrow. Nay, sorrow has nothing of beauty in it; it is sordid, ugly, worn and old; it is full of fear, rage, disappointment, ruffled selfishness, and outraged self-love. It is an unworthy passion; it is of the world, worldly; of the earth, earthy; of hell, hellish. We shall bid good-bye to it when we part from this earth, and shall not find it in Heaven.

Of course it was simple perversity which made Horatia plead so for her husband. Certainly she did so. She had told her friend that she had envied her happiness; that she was glad to see her give up her hus band; that she would forgive him and look over all this, even this last bitter, bitter insult, rather than live alone, widowed, in this strange fashion for ever!

"Forgive him!" cried Amy, dashing down her little fist upon her white hand; "forgive him cruelty, neglect, or tyranny, aye, any wrong but that. Were he to come and kneel now here, and sob out his repentance, you should not forgive him. He has desecrated an holy office, broken vows sworn most solemnly, and violated a trust taken by himself. They make light of marriage now a days, of marriage oaths and vows, but you shall be wiser. Do you think if once pardoned, this man would not sin again. His oaths are false as spring ice, his protestations nothing. You would but subject yourself to grosser ill. A casual sin committed in folly and in passion, might have been overlooked, but this is one systematised and planned, which never can. Oh, madam, madam, for you to pardon such a crime, would be as great a sin, almost, as to commit it."

"That is what the law says," said the saddler, rising solemnly-he alluded, of course, to the Christian law, for as to that which is dealt out by Her Majesty's justices of the peace, and of which barristers and attorneys are the expounders, he had little opinion. "You must put him away, and for ever separate from him. He is to be to you as

one unknown.

"He shall never come near me," sobbed Horatia; "he shall be no more a father to my child. I shall wake in the silent night and I shall miss him; in the morning he will not be with me, and in the evening his chair will be empty, though he be not dead. The father of my

child will be my enemy, not my friend; between us there must be a great gulf fixed. I cannot teach the lad to honor his father, and his mother he will suspect, as one bereft and alone. God help me, this will continue during my weary life, and passing that, and hindering me from receiving his last breath, will cast its shadow on the world to come."

"So be it," moralised the saddler; "it is the Captain's fault and penalty for sin. The seeds of guilt take time, perhaps, to grow, but bear a certain harvest. There's not a little act, small as this finger" (the puritan's logic was not very good, if you please, madam, but his meaning was right)"but bears its consequences with it; and sister, he will find sooner or later, that as he has sown, he must reap.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE SEQUEL.

I DECLARE I am quite tired, and wish to get away from the sorry family, and the preaching saddler, aye, and from Mrs. Amy, too. I believe it was half jealousy which made her discover the Captain's amours, and 'tis certain that the Captain himself had that opinion, and gave it out amongst his friends. Mr. John Heartwell, who had been a merchant, or some pitiful trader, and was no gentleman, and therefore, perhaps, to be excused from having fine feelings when his wife told him all her adventure, and put her arms round his neck, and kissing him, said that she had trodden out the last embers of an unworthy passion, and that she knew, and for the first time, how to honor him and to love him;-he, I say, embraced her again, and said he quite forgave her any imputed fault, nay, that he loved her the more for having been in love with the Captain. Mr. Heartwell was, as. I before said, a very pitiful fellow for this, but somehow or another, was the envy of all his friends, for his happy home and excellent wife, although perfectly despised by Captain Smooth. The latter gentleman had, for a time, his abettors, and the Beresford, let us say it to her credit, stuck to him as long as he had a shilling left; nay, assumed the name of Mrs. Smooth, and would pleasantly refer to the little adventure, and the visit of Mrs. Amy.

Having an imitative talent of no mean order, Mrs. Beresford Smooth did, to the Captain's great delight, in the presence of several jolly dogs, his companions, go through the whole scene, taking off Mrs. Amy and the puritan saddler to the life, and asking of " Tootsey," with a triumphant scream of laughter, "if it wasn't just the way its missus was bullied." Tootsey upon this would give several short " yaps," and then turn himself round on the hearthrug and sleep. A lawyer,

who afterwards gave her his hand, a stray young gentleman of some family and no morals, an editor of a scurrilous newspaper, and two of three others of Mr. Smooth's miscellaneous acquaintance, formed the audience of this little drama, and applauded loudly. Perhaps, however, the best fun was to see the Beresford's idea of poor Horatia. She had seen that lady once, and at a distance, and yet she caught the spirit of the figure so well, that her caricature was far from being an inferior one. The voice and action was, of course, perfectly untrue, but the Captain was not displeased at seeing his wife translated into a virago and a scold, and applauded the performance as loudly as ever. So matters ran on. Το you, and to me, and such like jolter-headed fellows, who will insult Providence by measuring its actions by our ideas, guilt was perfectly successful. The Captain never looked better in his life, and the Beresford grew plump and fat. The real Mrs. Smooth was, on the contrary, rather pale and livid. Her eyes were very often red, and in the long, long nights, the little boy, who slept in a small dressing-room near his mother, who had somehow a perpetual dread of him being snatched from her, can tell you how she spent them. But time bringing a healing anodyne, went along quite quietly and steadily to comfort Mrs. Horatia. There is nothing earthly that I know of, which will stop him, as he marches along, mowing right and left with that great scythe of his, to meet his arch enemy, Eternity.

But as cakes and ale tire and grow tasteless in the mouth of good Sir Toby, so successful vice will pall upon us-if the rope be only long enough 'twill hang us-and so Captain Smooth and his friend began to fall out, and to find the bond between them made of sand. We know from Scottish legends, that even "Auld Nickie Ben" could not gift ropes of sand with cohesion, and such things will not keep human beings together. The Captain soon began to find out the Beresford's selfishness, and to thoroughly object to that leech-like spirit of hers, which continually cried, "give, give." She would ask for books, plate, jewellery, china, any little nick-nack or unconsidered trifle, and it being once given, would ever afterwards call it her own. She exhibited a systematised selfishness which was peculiarly offensive to a very selfish man. She never did a thing without a proximate or ultimate reward, and in the prosecution of this meritorious line of duty-which others beside the Beresford take up-it is not to be wondered that she considerably worried and punished her confiding Captain.

The time came at last when Mr. Smooth's fortune began to ebb; a legal separation had been drawn up between himself and my mother, and he had nothing to depend upon but his fortune or his luck; that turned, and he who had so often wou lost as rapidly. He came to the bower of his Armida one day, this sinful, faulty Rinaldo, and found that she had quietly carried away all the most valuable part of the furniture, even to the tables and secretary, which from time to time she had wheedled out of the Captain, and had left him but a chair or so to sit on, the carpet, hearthrug, and the fire-irons. A note, rudely written and execrably spelt, gave him to understand that she had formed an engagement with another gentleman, and that she had taken away all her presents, of which a list, with dates of

each gift, was enclosed, and that she wished him (the Captain) well. The servant, who had her bonnet on, and merely stayed to deliver her master the key of the house, came in immediately he had read the note, and begged to say that she must "join her missus."

The Captain, who had eaten little or nothing that day, and who was "down on his luck," sat whistling a fag-end of a tune till he heard the garden gate slam; he next walked up and down the room twice or thrice, threw open the window, and kicked a worn-out and deserted wickerkennel of Tootsy's out of it, and then, overpowered by his feelings, sat down, and fairly burst into tears.

(To be concluded in our next.)