the ground, and you are a tradesman in a small country town, and my
sister is dead, and I henceforth am--John Smith! You say that you did
not mention my name to the schoolmaster,--still keep it concealed;
forget that I once was a Leslie. Our tie of brotherhood ceases when I
go from your hearth. Write, then, to your head-master, who attends
to arithmetic, and secure the rank of his usher in Latin and Greek
for--John Smith!"

Not many days afterwards, the protege of Audley Egerton entered on his
duties as usher in one of those large, cheap schools, which comprise a
sprinkling of the sons of gentry and clergymen designed for the learned
professions, with a far larger proportion of the sons of traders,
intended, some for the counting-house, some for the shop and the till.
There, to this day, under the name of John Smith, lives Randal Leslie.

It is probably not pride alone that induces him to persist in that
change of name, and makes him regard as perpetual the abandonment of
the one that he took from his forefathers, and with which he had once
identified his vaulting ambition; for shortly after he had quitted
his brother's house, Oliver read in the weekly newspaper, to which he
bounded his lore of the times in which he lived, an extract from
an American journal, wherein certain mention was made of an English
adventurer who, amongst other aliases, had assumed the name of
Leslie,--that extract caused Oliver to start, turn pale, look round,
and thrust the paper into the fire. From that time he never attempted to
violate the condition Randal had imposed on him, never sought to renew
their intercourse, nor to claim a brother. Doubtless, if the adventurer
thus signalized was the man Oliver suspected, whatever might be imputed
to Randal's charge that could have paled a brother's cheek, it was none
of the more violent crimes to which law is inexorable, but rather (in
that progress made by ingratitude and duplicity, with Need and Necessity
urging them on) some act of dishonesty which may just escape from the
law, to sink, without redemption, the name. However this be, there is
nothing in Randal's present course of life which forbodes any deeper
fall. He has known what it is to want bread, and his former restlessness
subsides into cynic apathy.

He lodges in the town near the school, and thus the debasing habit of
unsocial besotment is not brought under the eyes of his superior. The
drain is his sole luxury; if it be suspected, it