"wilt thou please thine arch-enemy, and be eternally damned, by entertaining the belief that the soul of the hanged man can enter into the root, and enrich thee, when it is actually the Devil himself that is in it; inasmuch as the soul of the thief is in limbo and cannot continue the evil practices of his lifetime, being securely kept by the righteous dccree of the Almighty until the day of the final judgment ?” We should require to put on the black coat again to enable us to do justice to the rest of this sublime peroration, and in this weather it would make us so uncomfortably warm that, taking the nature of the subject into consideration, we should begin to believe that our pockets were stuffed full of allraunen, so the reader must imagine the remainder.

We shall conclude this chapter with a story of a widower, a potter, who in a certain city married a clockmaker's daughter. This latter continued with other potter's wives to sell her earthenware in the market. At last her husband gave her something wrapped up in a cloth, telling her that, as long as she kept it she would find a speedy and excellent market for her goods. The foolish woman must needs show her talisman to her fellow-women, and, as curiosity is an amiable weakness of the sex, they were not

content with an outside inspection, but ripped open the cloth, and found therein a thief's thumb with the nail grown as long as a Chinaman's. An immense hubbub ensued, and, "as two of a trade never agree," the unfortunate potter was denounced to the authorities. He said, on being questioned, that the talisman was given to him by an individual whom he met in his travels, as being the thumb of a thief that had been burned by the hangman's hands; but, whether the magistrates happened to be a little more enlightened than common, or whatever was the cause, he was let off on this occasion with a whole skin, although Dr. Bräuner is decidedly of opinion that he ought to have been set down as a sorcerer. And here we close this edifying chapter.

CHAPTER XVII.

"Quid non mortalia pectora cogis,

Auri sacra fames."

ENEID, III, 56.

"Oh, cursed hunger of pernicious gold

What bonds of faith can impious lucre hold?"

DRYDEN.

OF HIDDEN TREASURES.

We tell you, what it is, Dr. Bräuner, that if you think that we are going to break our back with transcribing your long-winded sermons about the evils of covetousness, you will find

yourself cruelly mistaken. The thing has been much better done by the Revd. Mr. Harris, in his far-famed Mammon, with a trifling error or two, in which he declares Omnipotence to have been repeatedly foiled by the Devil, whom he makes the stronger party, a mistake from which, to do you justice, you are free, as you do circumscribe the power of Satan a little. But there is this much to be said in favor of the former, that, being an Independent, he would fain make the Devil independent also; and that, in aiming at fine language, he has thoroughly mystified himself and his readers, and the poor man did not actually know what he was writing.

We will therefore suppose our readers to be fully convinced of the fact that, "the love of money is the root of all evil," by which people are led captive of the Devil, and proceed to what Dr. B. says after the passage we have skipped.

He tells us that it is an undeniable fact, that great wealth and riches are concealed in the ground, being sometimes treasure that people have buried in war time, and then dying, the knowledge of the hiding-place has perished with them. With this treasure the Devil plays his juggling tricks, although he has no power either to appropriate it to himself, or bestow it

upon others which latter impediment, we presume, does not give him the heart-ache, if we are to believe all that we were told in the last chapter of his niggardly disposition. However, he is able so far to make use of it as to blind the eyes of those men who are intoxicated with the love of wealth, and are not satisfied with what Providence has bestowed upon them.

Now it is beyond doubt that those people who, under the full dominion of covetousness and avarice, go and dig for these Devil's treasures, are the joy of his heart; but people should not so far give the rein to their desires as to ascribe power to the Devil, who can only have as much as God pleases to allow him. It is certain that Satan leads many men into his net, by deluding them with the hopes of hidden treasure, and, knowing how generally men desire to be rich, he delights to take up his abode in those places where many people are to be found who are filled with these desires, and disregarding the blessing of God, seek to be rich with his assistance. We will not affirm it as a positive fact that we have ever seen his Satanic majesty, but we have a vivid recollection of having in our younger days seen a suspicious looking gentleman very busy on the Royal Exchange of London; but whether it was Lucifer or a beef