high place she occupied
amongst the nations of the earth. All this was, perhaps, true; the only
pity was that the paean over our greatness should be also a funeral wail
over thousands reduced to beggary and want! For weeks the newspapers had
no other themes than the misery of this man's cruel frauds. Magistrates
were besieged by appeals from people reduced to the last destitution;
public offices crowded with applicants, pressing to know if the titles
or securities they held as the sole guarantees of a livelihood, were
true or false. All confidence seemed gone. Men trembled at every letter
they opened; and none knew whether the tidings of each moment might not
be the announcement of utter ruin.

Until the event had actually occurred, it was not easy to conceive how
the dishonesty of one man could so effectually derange the whole complex
machinery of a vast society; but so it really proved. So intensely had
the money-getting passion taken possession of the national mind, so
associated had national prosperity seemed to be with individual wealth,
that nothing appeared great, noble, or desirable but gold, and the
standard of material value was constituted to be the standard of all
moral excellence: intending to honor Industry, the nation had paid its
homage to Money!

Of all the victims to Dunn's perfidy, there was one who never could be
brought to believe in his guilt This was the old Earl of Glengariff. So
stunned was he by the first news of the murder that his faculties never
rightly recovered the shock, and his mind balanced between a nervous
impatience for Dunn's arrival and a dreary despondency as to his coming;
and in this way he lived for years, his daughter watching over him with
every care and devotion, hiding with many an artifice the painful signs
of their reduced fortune, and feeding with many a false hope the old
man's yearnings for wealth and riches. The quiet old town of Bruges was
their resting-place; and there, amidst deserted streets and grass-grown
pavements, they lived, pitied and unknown.

The "Dunn Frauds," as by journalist phrase they were now recognized,
formed for months long a daily portion of the public reading, and only
at length yielded their interest to a case before the "Lords,"--the
claim preferred by a Crimean hero to the title of Viscount Lackington,
and of which some successful trials at Bar gave speedy promise of good
result. Indeed, had the question been one to be decided by popular