me, nor how severely it has affected my nerves."

With one more urgent appeal to lose not an hour in hastening over the
Alps, the letter concluded; the single word "weaker," apparently written
after the letter was sealed, giving a deep meaning to the whole.

Davis was not satisfied with one perusal of the latter portion of this
letter, but read it over carefully a second time; after which, taking a
sheet of paper, he wrote down the names of Fordyce and Terence Driscoll.
He then opened a Directory, and running his eye down a column, came to
"Fordyce and Fraude, 7 Furnivats Inn, solicitors." Of Terence Driscolls
there were seventeen, but all in trade,--tanners, tinmen, last-makers,
wharfingers, and so on; not one upon whom Davis could fix the likelihood
of the correspondence with the Viscount. He then walked the room, cigar
in mouth, for about an hour, after which he sat down and wrote the note
to Beecher which we have given in a former chapter, with directions
to call upon Stein, the moneylender, and then hasten away from Aix as
speedily as possible. This finished, he addressed another and somewhat
longer epistle to Lazarus Stein himself, of which latter document this
true history has no record.

We, perhaps, owe an apology to our reader for inverting in our narrative
the actual order of these events. It might possibly have been more
natural to have preceded the account of Beecher's reception of the
letter by the circumstances we have just detailed. We selected the
present course, however, to avoid the necessity of that continual change
of scene, alike wearisome to him who reads as to him who writes; and as
we are about to sojourn in Mr. Davis's company for some time to come,
we have deferred the explanation to a time when it should form part of a
regular series of events. Nor are we sorry at the opportunity of asking
the reader to turn once again to that brief note, and mark its
contents. Though Davis was fully impressed with the conviction that Lord
Lackington's days were numbered; though he felt that, at any moment,
some chance rumor, some flying report might inform Beecher what great
change was about to come over his fortunes,--yet this note is written in
all the seeming carelessness of a gossiping humor: he gives the latest
news of the turf, he alludes to Beecher's new entanglements at home, to,
his own newly discovered martingale for the play-table, trusting to the
one line about "Benson's people" to make Beecher