order on Hamerton for seventeen thousand four
hundred and forty-eight gulden, principal and interest for
three years, of an unjust demand made by you on me before
the tribunal of Bruges.

You failed, even with all the aid of your knavish laws and
more knavish countrymen, to establish this iniquitous claim,
and only succeeded in exhibiting yourselves as rogues and
swindlers,--good burgher-like qualities in your commercial
city.

I have now paid what I never owed; but there still remains
between us an unsettled score. Let my present punctuality
guarantee the honorable intentions I entertain of settling
it one day; till when, as you have shown yourselves my
enemy,

Believe me to be yours, Roland Cashel.

The order on the banker ran as follows:--

Pay to Vanderhaeghen und Droek, two of the greatest knaves alive,
seventeen thousand four hundred and forty-eight gulden, being the
principal and interest for three years of a dishonest claim made upon
Roland Cashel. To Hamerton and Co., Cheapside.

With all that soothing consciousness we hear is the result of good
actions, Cashel lay down on his bed immediately on concluding this last
epistle, and was fast asleep almost before the superscription was dried.

And now, worthy reader, another peep, and we have done. Ascending
cautiously the stairs, you pass through a little conservatory, at the
end of which a heavy cloth curtain conceals a door. It is that of a
dressing-room, off which, at opposite sides, two bedrooms lie. This same
dressing-room, with its rose-colored curtains and ottoman, its little
toilet-tables of satin-wood, its mirrors framed in alabaster, its
cabinets of buhl, and the book-shelves so coquettishly curtained with
Malines lace, is the common property of the two sisters whom we so
lately introduced to your notice.

There were they wont to sit for hours after the return from a ball,
discussing the people they had met, their dress, their manner, their
foibles and flirtations; criticising with no mean acuteness all the
varied games of match-making mammas and intriguing aunts, and
canvassing the schemes and snares so rife around them. And oh, ye
simple worshippers of muslin-robed innocence! oh, ye devoted slaves
of ringleted loveliness and blooming freshness! bethink ye what wily
projects lie crouching in hearts that would seem the very homes of
careless happiness; what calculations; what