verses of the Koran in letters of pure brilliants, nothing?"

"You'll drive me distracted with your insane folly," rejoined the lady,
rising and pushing back her chair with violence. "To talk this way when
you know you have n't got a five pound note in the world."

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed out the jolly voice of the other; "that's good,
faith. If I only consented to dip my Irish property, I could raise
fourteen hundred and seventy thousand pounds,--so Mahony tells me. But I
'll never give up the royalties,--never! There, you have my last word on
the matter: rather than surrender my tin mine, I'd consent to starve
on twelve thousand a year, and resign my claim to the title which,
I believe, the next session will give me; and when you are Lady
Machinery--something or other--maybe they won't bite, eh? Ramskins
versus wrinkles."

A violent bang of the door announced at this moment the exit of the lady
in a rage, to which her companion paid no attention, as he continued to
mumble to himself, "Surrender the royalties,--never! Oh, she 's gone.
Well, she's not far wrong, after all. I dare not draw a cheque on my own
exchequer at this moment for a larger sum than--let me see--twenty-four,
twenty-five, twenty-eight and tenpence; with twenty-nine shillings,
the grand firm of Bubbleton and Co. must shut up and suspend their
payments." So saying, he walked from the room in stately fashion, and
closed the door after him.

My first thought, as I listened to this speech, was one of gratefulness
that I had fallen into the friendly hands of my old coach companion,
whose kindness still lived fresh in my memory; my next was, what
peculiar form of madness could account for the strange outpouring I had
just overheard, in which my own name was so absurdly introduced, coupled
with family circumstances I knew never had occurred. Sleep was now out
of the question with me; for whole hours long I could do nothing but
revolve in my mind all the extraordinary odds and ends of my friend
Bubbleton's conversation, which I remembered to have been so struck by
at my first meeting with him. The miraculous adventures of his career,
his hairbreadth 'scapes, his enormous wealth, the voluptuous ease of his
daily life, and his habits of luxury and expenditure with which he then
astounded me, had now received some solution; while, at the same time,
there was something in his own common-sense observations to himself
that puzzled me much, and gave a great difficu