shaking him by the hand.

"Yes," says he.

"And is my lady and your family here at Richmond?"

"No," says he, with a sad shake of the head; and the poor fellow's
hollow eyes filled with tears.

"Good heavens, Denny! what's the matter?" said I. He was squeezing my
hand like a vice as I spoke.

"They've LEFT me!" he burst out with a dreadful shout of passionate
grief--a horrible scream which seemed to be wrenched out of his heart.
"Left me!" said he, sinking down on a seat, and clenching his great
fists, and shaking his lean arms wildly. "I'm a wise man now, Mr.
Fitz-Boodle. Jemima has gone away from me, and yet you know how I loved
her, and how happy we were! I've got nobody now; but I'll die soon,
that's one comfort: and to think it's she that'll kill me after all!"

The story, which he told with a wild and furious lamentation such as is
not known among men of our cooler country, and such as I don't like now
to recall, was a very simple one. The mother-in-law had taken possession
of the house, and had driven him from it. His property at his marriage
was settled on his wife. She had never loved him, and told him this
secret at last, and drove him out of doors with her selfish scorn and
ill-temper. The boy had died; the girls were better, he said, brought up
among the Molloys than they could be with him; and so he was quite alone
in the world, and was living, or rather dying, on forty pounds a year.

His troubles are very likely over by this time. The two fools who caused
his misery will never read this history of him; THEY never read godless
stories in magazines: and I wish, honest reader, that you and I went to
church as much as they do. These people are not wicked BECAUSE of
their religious observances, but IN SPITE of them. They are too dull to
understand humility, too blind to see a tender and simple heart under
a rough ungainly bosom. They are sure that all their conduct towards my
poor friend here has been perfectly righteous, and that they have given
proofs of the most Christian virtue. Haggarty's wife is considered by
her friends as a martyr to a savage husband, and her mother is the angel
that has come to rescue her. All they did was to cheat him and desert
him. And safe in that wonderful self-complacency with which the fools
of this earth are endowed, they have not a single pang of conscience for
their villany towards him, consider their heartlessness as a proof and
consequence of their spotless piety a