ied
Sir Christopher.

La pauvre petite Meronville! What an Ariadne! Just as I was thinking
to play the Bacchus to your Theseus, up steps an old gentleman from
Yorkshire, who hears it is fashionable to marry bonas robas, proposes
honourable matrimony, and deprives me and the world of La Meronville!
The wedding took place on Monday last, and the happy pair set out to
their seat in the North. Verily, we shall have quite a new race in the
next generation; I expect all the babes will skip into the world with a
pas de zephyr, singing in sweet trebles,--

"Little dancing loves we are!
Who the deuce is our papa?"

I think you will be surprised to hear that Lord Borodaile is beginning
to thaw; I saw him smile the other day! Certainly, we are not so near
the North Pole as we were! He is going, and so am I, in the course of
the autumn, to your old friends the Westboroughs. Report says that he is
un peu epris de la belle Flore; but, then, Report is such a liar! For my
own part I always contradict her.

I eagerly embrace your offer of correspondence, and assure you that
there are few people by whose friendship I conceive myself so much
honoured as by yours. You will believe this; for you know that, like
Callythorpe, I never flatter. Farewell for the present.

Sincerely yours, HAVERFIELD.

CHAPTER LVI.

Q. Eliz.--Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?
K. Rich.--Ay, if the devil tempt thee to do good.
Q. Eliz.--Shall I forget myself to be myself?--SHAKSPEARE.

It wanted one hour to midnight, as Crauford walked slowly to the lonely
and humble street where he had appointed his meeting with Glendower. It
was a stormy and fearful night. The day had been uncommonly sultry, and,
as it died away, thick masses of cloud came labouring along the air,
which lay heavy and breathless, as if under a spell,--as if in those
dense and haggard vapours the rider of the storm sat, like an incubus,
upon the atmosphere beneath, and paralyzed the motion and wholesomeness
of the sleeping winds. And about the hour of twilight, or rather when
twilight should have been, instead of its quiet star, from one obscure
corner of the heavens flashed a solitary gleam of lightning, lingered a
moment,--

"And ere a man had power to say, Behold!
The jaws of darkness did devour it up."

But then, as if awakened from a torpor by a signal universally
acknowledged, from the courts and quarters of heaven, came, blaze after
blaze, and peal up