paper, and who wanted to fight a duel with papa because he wasn't asked to dinner. I don't believe in any poets except "Vates" of the Morning Advertiser, and he's more a prophet than a poet. However, your poet looks very poor. Lord Carnation, you'd better leave him a check for five pounds."

The young nobleman looked very uneasy at this recommendation, and murmured something about "the many calls upon him."

It is true that an infinity of calls were made upon the Earl of Carnation; but one of the most difficult things in the world was to find his lordship at home.

"And it is thus they pass the bard," Tottlepot said with a bitter groan, as he emerged into the street: "pass him with contumely and neglect. But a day will come-a day will come." And away went Tottlepot to keep his appointment in Leicester Square.

Simon Lefranc saw him-Who but he? Simon had been wearing his heart upon his sleeve, and airing it in the sunshine, in front of a little tobacconist's and periodical shop opposite the Chambers. As Tottlepot crossed the road, Simon passed behind him, and smote him in a jovial manner on the shoulder.

The poor poet turned round. His face was very livid, and he trembled all over.

"Courage, mon garçon; courage, my Tottlepot," Simon said in his cheery manner. "Bright days are in store for thee, my poet." And having dismissed him somewhat reassured, but still very nervous, Simon took to sporting that heart of his-always on his sleeve, I need not sayround the adjacent street-corners, and in front of the cab-stand, and in the entries of half a dozen little shops. The mid-day beer-boy was delighted with him, and almost felt inclined to give him eleemosynary refreshment from his can. The little children danced round him, and made much of a halfpenny which he bestowed on one of their number. A troupe of Ethiopian serenaders sang, it seemed, their most enlivening ditties specially for him. The very sparrows of Soho appeared to peck their morsels round about his feet without diffidence. Ah, it is a fine thing to

wear our heart upon our sleeve, and to make a sunshine wherever we go! For all his little trips about, however, I don't think that for two consecutive minutes Simon ever lost sight of the doorway of the Monmouth Chambers, or the grand carriage there drawn up.

Ruthyn Pendragon was in the reading-room, brooding over a book, as the distinguished party entered.. The little old marquis was close by, pottering too over his interminable and never-to-be-terminated Dictionary. Ruthyn looked up as the ladies and gentlemen entered. He heard the steward whisper, "French nobleman," and then, "Clergyman of the Church of England." He knew himself to be alluded to. He felt his face on fire. He felt first a cataract of molten lead, and then one of ice, flow down his back. He felt the moisture at the roots of his hair, on his eyelids. He felt his heart bound, like a newly caged wild beast striving

to dash itself to death against the bars of its den. He felt that if one mercy could be bestowed upon him, one crowning act of grace and pity, it would be for the floor of this mean room to open and swallow him up from sight and shame. But it was not to be so; and he was to eat his Humble Pie to the very last flake of the crust.

The curate, usually so harmless, and always well-meaning, was enabled, quite unconsciously, to do at this time a very pretty piece of mischief. He came up to where Pendragon sat, his hair almost touching the book before him, and made use of some simperingly good-hearted expressions, setting forth, it may have been, that he was sorry to see a clergyman so reduced in circumstances, but that he was glad to see him engaged in study, and the like.

Ruthyn Pendragon started to his feet with a cry.

"What the devil is that to you?" he demanded ferociously of the amazed curate.

The steward, quite shocked, stepped forward, for he thought the clergyman was about to hurl the book he had been reading at his brother parson. As for Lord Carnation, he looked more amused than otherwise.

"Wides wusty," he simpered, adjusting his eye-glass; "don't like being asked questions sometimes. Wemember a man in Bedlam wanting to stwangle me because I asked why he cut his wife and thwee childwen's heads off. Only yesterday, burglar in penitentiary twied to stab chaplain, because he asked him to say, 'Twinkle, twinkle, little'-what was it?"-here Lord Carnation's memory played him false-"before self and the Dean of Dorking."

Letitia and Magdalen had both recognised the ex-curate of Swordsley, the shabby lodger in the shabby Chambers. The generous Amazon would have rushed forward to shake hands with Pendragon; but a stern grasp withheld, a stern, albeit low, voice forbade her.

"Let us go," said Magdalen Hill, and positively forced her companion from the room.

"This is no place for us," she added, pale and scared, when they were in the corridor.

"It's no place for him," Letitia exclaimed indignantly. "Poor fellow! he looks half-starved. Let us go back, Magdalen. Curb your devilish pride for once. Say but one word. Shall I call him to us?"

She would not curb her pride, all demoniacal as it may have been. She would not move. She would not say the word. Ah, that tug at the bridle! Ah, that step in advance! Ah, that word, which women will not speak! It may be that it was but a little word, after all, that first sowed dissension between Menelaus and Helen, and that had the word been spoken in good season all the woes of Troy might have been spared.

As it was, Magdalen Hill marched resolutely towards her carriage, and Lord Carnation, still amused, and the curate, still amazed, followed. The steward would have lingered for a moment to give the ummannerly

lodger a week's notice to quit the Chambers; but Miss Salusbury pre

vented him.

"You know that gentleman?" she asked.

“I'm sure, madam, I'm very sorry that he should have so misbehaved himself. The committee won't allow him to stay after this, I needn't say."

"I hope they won't. He ought never to have been here at all. I ask you if you know him?"

He gave his name.

He doesn't seem to be

You need not say any

"Surely, madam. ashamed of it. The Reverend Ruthyn Pendragon-that's it." "Very well, give him this piece of paper. thing about it to any body. You seem a very decent sort of fellow; there's a sovereign for you." And Miss Salusbury hurried after her companion, and the carriage drove away.

They dropped the curate at a schoolhouse, where some eighty children howled hymns from morning till night, and could read all the genealogies in Scripture with tolerable fluency, but were utterly unable to spell through an ordinary paragraph in the newspaper. They dropped Lord Carnation at his club in Pall Mall, where he lunched:-at the expense of the club. And then Letitia Salusbury turned to Magdalen Hill, and said,

"Magdalen,"-she would not condescend to use a diminutive,-"you have treated that man shamefully."

"I am not well. Let us go home," was all that Magdalen would reply, hiding her face in her handkerchief-but not to weep, I am afraid.

When the carriage had been bowed away from the Chambers by the steward and his wife, the former imparted to his helpmate the strange incident that had occurred in the reading-room, and showed her the paper that he was to deliver to Pendragon. It was not sealed, and I fear that Mrs. Steward, incited by the natural curiosity of her sex,— and has our sex no "natural curiosity," I should like to know?-would have had little hesitation in gleaning some knowledge of its contents, but for the salutarily rigid ideas of discipline entertained by her husband.

"No, no," he said; "no pollprying. I'll go and take it to the parson at once, for fear of accidents."

He met Pendragon coming hurriedly from the reading-room.

"I am going away," Ruthyn said, in a thick strange voice. "I owe nothing, and am free to depart."

"That you may please yourself about," retorted the steward; "but one of the ladies left this for you, and you may as well read it before you go."

Pendragon took the paper from the other's hand. It had been hastily folded, or rather crumpled, together. He read it, and turned his head away, for his eyes were full of tears.

CHAPTER XXIV.

NEMESIS IN PLAIN CLOTHES.

THE greatest men have their weaknesses: their little penchants and propensities. Thus the weakness of Inspector Millament was for reading cheap periodicals, and that of Sergeant South for studying play bills.

Our old acquaintance Mr. Sims, who has been very busy all this time, although you have not heard so much about him, used to be very partial to theatrical performances, and went to the play, in more senses than one, two or three times a week; but the dramatic fancy of Sergeant South took more of a theoretical than of a practical turn. If veluti in speculum were his motto, it was more to look in the window where the play bill hung than to gaze into the mirror of the proscenium. Now and then the Sergeant entered the doors of a theatre; but he went habitually behind the scenes, and eschewed the audience part of the house. It was said that Sergeant South had once passed three months of his existence as a supernumerary at one of our principal places of Thespian amusement, and that he went on the stage regularly every night, either accoutred in a plumed bonnet and red tights, and carrying a banner, or else arrayed in a tunic and buff boots, and bearing a tin javelin as one of the retainers of a ruthless baron. Humble as was his standing in that Theatre Royal, it did not prevent his holding frequent and secret conference with the manager; and at the end of the three months it so happened that Sergeant South disappeared without warning, and without troubling the "super-master" for his outstanding salary; and that two or three days afterwards he was constrained, through a keen sense of duty towards his country in general, and the ends of justice in particular, to give evidence at the Marlborough-Street Police-Court against one Mouchy, a felonious employé of the theatre, who had pilfered many articles of rich costume from the dressing-rooms. The Sergeant was highly complimented by the presiding magistrate on the astuteness and sagacity he had displayed in tracing the perpetrator of so many robberies.

But it was, after all, towards the playbills that Sergeant South displayed the most ardent and disinterested affection. He was always pondering over these black and red letter documents, and spelling over their contents with a solicitude that was more than affectionate : it was paternal. His hands in his pockets and his head on one side, Sergeant South would go through the entire contents, from the name of the theatre and the address of the manager and lessee to the Vivant Regina et Princeps and "No Money returned," at the bottom. He would bestow the same amount of attention on the bill of some transpontine saloon, with three monstrous and murderous melodramas per night, as upon the lordly proclamations of the Italian Opera, with their announcements of Don Giovanni " by command," or a grand ballet "by desire." Nothing in playbill literature came amiss to him. He did not disdain the placards of music-halls, of

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M

suburban gardens, of raree-shows, or dwarf and giant exhibitions, or niggersingers, or "drawing-room entertainments"-which last I take to be the very lowest kind of popular amusement that this, our present era of civilisation, has seen. Sergeant South had an eye for all these waifs and strays of recreation. He liked to linger at stationers' and tobacconists' shops and see his beloved playbill-boards reposing on the area-railings. He knew all the bill-stickers, and watched them at their work assiduously. There was a large theatrical public-house which he specially affected, and of which not only the coffee-room, but the very walls of the bar were thickly covered with playbills. The inexpres sibly dilapidated men and women-where do they all come from, and whither are they all going?-who sell programmes, "books of the Hopera," and "bills of the play" in the purlieus of our dramatic and lyric fanes were all known to Sergeant South. He was known, likewise, to all those gentry, and, to tell truth, a little feared by them.

His

Sergeant South, in age, was wavering between the thirties and the forties; but seemed unable to make up his mind towards the latter. He was the youngest looking of middle-aged men, with a fresh blue eye, and chestnut hair, and a little pink spot on each cheek, and an almost downy whisker. But for thick-serried ranges of crow's-feet under his eyes, and some ominous lines about his mouth, he would have looked a mere boy; as it was, he had somewhat the appearance of a youth who had been stopping up rather late on the night-side of life. Sergeant South dressed with exquisite neatness, and not without a certain kind of elegance. turn-down collar was irreproachably white; his scarf beautifully tied; his horseshoe-pin quiet, but handsome. His hair was always well brushed. He wore a natty watchguard, and a neat signet-ring. If there was one particular in which he did not display taste, or elegance, or, indeed, neatness, it was in that of boots. Those leathern casings were very thick and clumsy, and had hobnails, and were but indifferently well polished. It is a curious fact, but you may in general recognise gentlemen of the profession of Sergeant South, and under what would otherwise be the most impenetrable of disguises, by their boots.

Sergeant South's stanch friend, confidential comrade, and superior, indeed, in the hierarchy to which both belonged, was Inspector Millament. He should have been mentioned first, perhaps; but there is yet time to make him full amends. Besides, he was a tranquil, peace-loving man, who never cared to thrust himself foremost. Give him but the Parlour Magazine, the Family Miscellany, the Backstairs Herald, all highly popular penny journals at that day, and he was satisfied. He waded through the endless romances published in his beloved serials with a calm and neverfailing delight. "To be continued in our next" were words of hope and joy to him. It is true that he habitually mixed up the plots of the novels he read into an inextricable jumble of perplexity; that the marquis in one story became dovetailed on to the gipsy-chief in the other, and the abducted heiress's adventures were frequently intertwined with those of the