can bear it!"

BOOK TWELFTH.

INITIAL CHAPTER.

WHEREIN THE CAXTON FAMILY REAPPEAR.

"Again," quoth my father,--"again behold us! We who greeted the
commencement of your narrative, who absented ourselves in the midcourse
when we could but obstruct the current of events, and jostle personages
more important,--we now gather round the close. Still, as the chorus to
the drama, we circle round the altar with the solemn but dubious
chant which prepares the audience for the completion of the appointed
destinies; though still, ourselves, unaware how the skein is to be
unravelled, and where the shears are to descend."

So there they stood, the Family of Caxton,--all grouping round me,
all eager officiously to question, some over-anxious prematurely to
criticise.

"Violante can't have voluntarily gone off with that horrid count," said
my mother; "but perhaps she was deceived, like Eugenia by Mr. Bellamy,
in the novel of 'CAMILLA'."

"Ha!" said my father, "and in that case it is time yet to steal a hint
from Clarissa Harlowe, and make Violante die less of a broken heart than
a sullied honour. She is one of those girls who ought to be killed! All
things about her forebode an early tomb!"

"Dear, dear!" cried Mrs. Caxton, "I hope not!"

"Pooh, brother," said the captain, "we have had enough of the tomb in
the history of poor Nora. The whole story grows out of a grave, and if
to a grave it must return--if, Pisistratus, you must kill somebody--kill
Levy."

"Or the count," said my mother, with unusual truculence. "Or Randal
Leslie," said Squills. "I should like to have a post-mortem cast of his
head,--it would be an instructive study."

Here there was a general confusion of tongues, all present conspiring
to bewilder the unfortunate author with their various and discordant
counsels how to wind up his story and dispose of his characters.

"Silence!" cried Pisistratus, clapping his hands to both ears. "I can no
more alter the fate allotted to each of the personages whom you honour
with your interest than I can change your own; like you, they must
go where events lead there, urged on by their own characters and the
agencies of others. Providence so pervadingly governs the universe,
that you cannot strike it even out of a book. The author may beget a
character, but the moment the character comes into action, it escapes
from his hands,--plays its own part, and fulfils its own inevitable
doom."

"Besides," said