are pace,
for which our critics habitually give us credit, we felt that our foot
beat time responsively to the measure, and that we actually began to
enjoy the performance.

In this position stood matters, when early one morning in December the
post brought us an ominous-looking epistle, which, even as we glanced
our eye on the outside, conveyed an impression of fear and misgiving
to our minds. If there are men in whose countenances, as Pitt remarked,
"villany is so impressed, it were impiety not to believe it," so are
there certain letters whose very-shape and colour, fold, seal, and
superscription have something gloomy and threatening--something of
menace and mischief about them. This was one of these: the paper was a
greenish sickly-white, a kind of dyspeptic foolscap; the very mill
that fabricated it might have had the shaking ague. The seal was of
bottle-wax, the impression, a heavy thumb. The address ran, "To H.
L." The writing, a species of rustic paling, curiously interwoven and
gnarled, to which the thickness of the ink lent a needless obscurity,
giving to the whole the appearance of something like a child's effort
to draw a series of beetles and cockroaches with a blunt stick; but what
most of all struck terror to our souls, was an abortive effort at the
words "Arthur O'Leary" scrawled in the corner.

What! had he really then escaped the perils of blubber and black men?
Was he alive, and had he come back to catch us, _in delicto_--in the
very fact of editing him, of raising our exhausted exchequer at
his cost, and replenishing our empty coffers under his credit? Our
suspicions were but too true. We broke the seal and spelled as follows--

"Sir--A lately-arrived traveller in these parts brings me intelligence,
that a work is announced for publication by you, under the title of
'The Loiterings of Arthur O'Leary,' containing his opinions, notions,
dreamings, and doings during several years of his life, and in various
countries. Now this must mean me, and I should like to know what are a
man's own, if his adventures are not? His ongoings, his 'begebenheiten,'
as the Germans call them, are they not as much his, as his--what shall I
say; his flannel waistcoat or his tobacco-pipe?

"If I have spent many years, and many pounds (of tobacco) in my
explorings of other lands, is it for you to reap the benefit? If I have
walked, smoked, laughed, and fattened from Trolhatten to Tehran, was
it that you should have the pr