is thought to be his
sole vice. He goes through the ordinary routine of tuition with average
credit; his spirit of intrigue occasionally shows itself in attempts
to conciliate the favour of the boys whose fathers are wealthy, who are
born to higher rank than the rest; and he lays complicated schemes to
be asked home for the holidays. But when the schemes succeed, and the
invitation comes, he recoils and shrinks back,--he does not dare to show
himself on the borders of the brighter world he once hoped to sway; he
fears that he may be discovered to be--a Leslie! On such days, when his
taskwork is over, he shuts himself up in his room, locks the door, and
drugs himself into insensibility.

Once he found a well-worn volume running the round of delighted
schoolboys, took it up, and recognized Leonard's earliest popular work,
which had, many years before, seduced himself into pleasant thoughts and
gentle emotions. He carried the book to his own lodgings, read it again;
and when he returned it to its young owner, some of the leaves were
stained with tears. Alas! perhaps but the maudlin tears of broken
nerves, not of the awakened soul,--for the leaves smelt strongly of
whiskey. Yet, after that re-perusal, Randal Leslie turned suddenly to
deeper studies than his habitual drudgeries required. He revived and
increased his early scholarship; he chalked the outline of a work of
great erudition, in which the subtlety of his intellect found field
in learned and acute criticism. But he has never proceeded far in this
work. After each irregular and spasmodic effort, the pen drops from his
hand, and he mutters, "But to what end?

"I can never now raise a name. Why give reputation to--John Smith?"

Thus he drags on his life; and perhaps, when he dies, the fragments of
his learned work may be discovered in the desk of the usher, and serve
as hints to some crafty student, who may filch ideas and repute from the
dead Leslie, as Leslie had filched them from the living Burley.

While what may be called poetical justice has thus evolved itself from
the schemes in which Randal Leslie had wasted rare intellect in baffling
his own fortunes, no outward signs of adversity evince the punishment
of Providence on the head of the more powerful offender, Baron Levy. No
fall in the Funds has shaken the sumptuous fabric, built from the ruined
houses of other men. Baron Levy is still Baron Levy the millionaire; but
I doubt if at heart he be not more acu