When Conscience leaves, the fiend is monarch in her place.

There are in Crime seven stages. It is first an infant. Evil thoughts and impure affections are its father and its mother; and, for a cradle, it is rocked within the breast. It lives only in the world of meditation. Upon its unborn features there is a vail. Feet and hands are like the talons of some unclean bird, the claws of some ravenous beast. Possessed of a vampire's appetite, it ravins for blood as for a mother's milk. Secrecy, the guilty nurse, hushes it with finger upon the lips. All the corrupt passions gather in council around the couch, and each endowers the new comer with some peculiar gift.

Crime, in the second stage, opens the bosom-door, crosses the threshold of visible existence, and walks abroad intent upon the deeds for which it had birth and being. An actor of all characters, it plays in Life's theatre as many parts as there are distinct elements in wickedness. It robs on high roads and is a pirate on the high seas, curses in tap-rooms and cants in conventicles, invents all frauds, coins all villainies, walks in all conspiracies, frequents all habitations, assumes all disguises, speaks all languages, provokes all controversies, and never rests day or night, but plots as well with bad men when they dream as against good men when they wake and labor. It hates all that Virtue loves, and loves all that Heaven hates; yet masks its double dealing with vows of love, oaths of honor, proverbs of religion and prayers of godliness. It takes to each man's eye the likeness of his own favorite sin, and tempts ever onward, with the flattering unction of triumph and happiness.

Crime in its third stage accomplishes the objects for which it sought, and, bodiless itself, works to infernal ends through human instruments. Then it returns, laden with wealth of spoil; for the avaricious gold, for the proud distinction, for the sensual license, for the cruel blood;-cry

ing "Master, rise! eat and drink; be satisfied; thou hast much goods laid up for many days." Then it re-enters the breast full grown, and makes the heart its hell.

In its fourth stage Crime seeks full mastery of the chosen habitation and boldly cries, "Conscience, out! You have no business here." Then Conscience, hitherto pleading vainly during evil years, with awful port and visage terrible to behold, as when the sun shineth in his strength, arraigns this Crime before the tribunal of the man's own meditations, and bears testimony against it. That is the eleventh hour, beyond which few if any amend their lives. If Conscience wins the suit, though not without throes that rend the, breast that harbored it, and after struggles in which the soul quivers with no small measure of the pain which it has inflicted on others, the fiend is exorcised. If not, and the man sides against Conscience and with Crime, pallid and with dishevelled locks, sad and tearful, a prophetess of utter woe, the monitress leaves him, and Crime is left sole ruler of the bosom.

Crime has a fifth state after this. There are no compunctious visitings any more. Conscience hovers over him, travels with him, for accusing angel, and darts keen lightnings from without, but finds no abode within. Then Crime says to the soul, with whom it has taken up lodging, "Up! action! action!" When Crime drives the swift firesteeds of the passions, the chariot of destiny rushes fast toward its goal.

After this Crime rises to a sixth stage. The fiend has mined the house he lives in. The appetites, which have gone out at his bidding, to prey upon others, all come back at last to feast upon their master. As the senses sink to imbecility and are unable longer to satisfy those craving tenants, they make the bosom hideous with an intestine war. All that Crime sows outwardly, in deeds which Conscience registers on iron tablet with pen of fire, is reaped

inwardly, when Old Age drives home the loaded wains of Sin's harvest time.

Toward the sands, that, gray and wrinkled, line the shores of the eternal sea, where the great CRIME, grown now colossal, looms up through the subject realms of being, like the spirit of some outcast planet from its mouldering, dissolving dust, comes now, swift flying across the gulf, a death-driven pinnace. Then Conscience, spreading flamy pinions, takes her station in the prow, while the man who exiled Conscience from the breast, now in the dotage of the natural faculties, with the great Crime crouching in the bony skeleton, all forlorn, all desolate, is lifted and sits behind. Then Conscience blows her trump, and gives those vast and gleamy vans to the storm, and the gulfs whirl and darken, and the land disappears, and the pinnace flies, bearing its freight, whither, ah! whither? What said the hymn, sung over Lucretia Lorne's dream of judgment, by Charity Green? This is Crime's seventh stage. Its scene of action becomes the second life.

The Rector of Richmanstown exiled Conscience that night, and woke, the ensuing morning, determined upon a plan of action. In reply to Attorney Bluefil he was prompt and energetic. "As soon as the suit is decided," thus ran answer, "and the validity of the instrument established in Doctors' Commons, you are at liberty to draw upon me for the full amount proposed."

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The next step called for a thorough survey of the entire field, and the scheme, conceived with a stoical coolness which astonished himself, when once formed, was carried into immediate execution. First arranging with the curate for the performance of the various sacerdotal functions, the Rector announced his departure for a brief tour on the continent, this being necessary for the restoration of slightly impaired health.

Immediately afterward, first drawing from his banker the

considerable sum still remaining, Dr. Bushwig crossed the channel en route for Paris,-where, after remaining for a few days, it was reported that he had gone up the Mediterranean.

Four weeks from the day on which two of the abductors of Charity Green were conveyed to Charleston prison, a middle aged gentleman, whose luggage bore the way-marks of Havre and New York, entered the name of Richard Ormsby on the register of the Charleston Hotel. Steam annihilates distance in these rapid days. Made up by one of the most skillful costumers of the French metropolis, none would have mistaken the new comer for an eminent Divine. The snugly buttoned snuff-colored suit, the precise air, together with a certain foxy acuteness about the eyes, no less than the ready gold, and the habit of indulging in costliest viands and rarest wines, might have suggested the retired man of wealth, possibly a money lender, or the exsteward of some great, foreign family. The Rector arrived in time.

Great peace crowned the waiting of Marian Deschamps. That life of truest heroism had not been without its trials. Her beautiful ideal was now shaped into the most plain and unpretending actual, with twenty-four little mouths to be fed, twenty-four little bodies to be clothed and duly cared for, twenty-four minds to be formed and cultured, and as many hearts to be set out in garden beds for Heaven's own quickening. The lovely heiress, thoroughly gifted with the rare faculty of carrying order into all departments of action, lived no dreamer's life. Hers was the true maxim,that no day is long enough for compliments, and that duty must preside over the hours and turn even the moments to best account. So her work throve. The tender children by this time began to repay her care in heart-growths of goodness, and their beautiful protector loved them as a rose tree warms toward its own blossoms.

All the details of the household were arranged with admirable exactness and the golden law of love made available as the incentive to action and its best reward. Marian soon began to be called "The Mother." At first one little thing, the youngest of all the orphans, lisped that angel name, and then, as by common consent, all the infant brood would use no other. The sensible English girl was no communist. The rights of mine and thine were studiously enforced. She aimed at making her charge simply plain, practical women. That highly wrought and exquisitely