ut I
feel a kind of pleasure in hearing that we 're all swamped together."

The girl smiled as though the remark were merely uttered in levity and
deserved no more serious notice; but a faint sigh, which she could not
repress, betrayed the sorrow with which she had heard it.

She opened the paper and glanced at its contents. They were as varied
and multifarious as are usually to be found in weekly "channels of
information." What struck her, however, most was the fact that, turn
where she would, the name of Davenport Dunn was ever conspicuous. Sales
of property displayed him as the chief creditor or petitioner; charities
paraded him as the first among the benevolent; Joint-stock companies
exhibited him as their managing director; mines, and railroads, and
telegraph companies, harbor committees, and boards of all kinds, gave
him the honors of large type; while in the fashionable intelligence from
abroad, his arrivals and departures were duly chronicled, and a letter
of our own correspondent from Venice communicated the details of a
farewell dinner given him, with a "Lord" in the chair, by a number of
those who had so frequently partaken of his splendid hospitalities while
he resided in that city.

"Well--well--well!" said Kellett, with a pause between each
exclamation, "this is more than I can bear. Old Jerry Dunn's son,--the
brat of a boy I remember in the Charter' School! He used to be sent at
Christmas time up to Ely Place, when my father was in town, to get five
shillings for a Christmas-box; and I mind well the day he was asked to
stay and dine with my sister Matty and myself, and he taught us a new
game with six little bits of sticks; how we were to do something, I
forget what,--but I know how it ended,--he won every sixpence we had.
Matty had half a guinea in gold and some tenpenny pieces, and I had, I
think, about fifteen shillings, and sorrow a rap he left us; and, worse
still, I mortgaged my school maps, and got a severe thrashing for having
lost them from Old White in Jervas Street; and poor Matty's doll
was confiscated in the same way, and carried off with a debt of
three-and-fourpence on her head. God forgive him, but he gave us a
sorrowful night, for we cried till daybreak."

"And did you like him as a playfellow?" asked she.

"Now, that's the strangest thing of all," said Kellett, smiling.
"Neither Matty nor myself liked him; but he got a kind of influence over
us that was downright fascination. No mat