the mews!" she cries; and in the next moment a hansom tears up to the door, a stentorian voice breaks out into exclamations of surprise and indignation, interspersed with execrations. A shrill scream breaks from the young wife's pale lips.

"Gus!" she cries, while Toodleums sets up a sympathetic shriek; 66 O, thank God! thank God!" and she must have fallen but for Hannah's supporting arms.

What

Yes; it is the Captain, dressed in black, and with a crape hatband. He distributes his anathemas freely as he strides into the villa. the dash is the meaning of this dashed business? Take down those dashed bills, and turn these dashed people out of the house; and so on. Mr. Absalom advances politely, and suggests that if the Captain will be so kind as to settle that little affair of 3261. 17s. 6d. the sale need not proceed. The Captain pulls out a bran-new check-book, and signs his first check upon a bran-new banking-account, which document he hands to Mr. Absalom with an injured air.

"You ought to have known better, Absalom," he said, "after all our past dealing."

"To tell you the truth, Captain, it was my experience of the past that made me rather sharp in the present," replied the other politely.

Come, Clara, don't cry," exclaimed Captain Hawthorndean to the poor little woman, who was sobbing on his shoulder. "I didn't get your letter till yesterday afternoon, and have been travelling ever since; I was away with a party in the mountains. And there's been a dreadful piece of work at Strathnairn my cousin Douglas, Sir John's only son, killed by the explosion of his rifle. No one to blame but himself, poor beg

poor dear fellow! Sir John's awfully cut up, as well he may be; and I'm next heir to the title and estates. Yes, little woman, you'll be Lady Strathnairn before you die; for my uncle will never marry, poor old boy! Very dreadful, ain't it, poor Douglas's death? but, of course, uncommonly jolly for us."

"O Gus, how awful for Sir John! But, thank God, you have come back! You can never understand what I've suffered; and if it hadn't been for Mr. Jiffins-"

"Jiffins! who the dooce is Jif

fins ?"

He

"The man in possession. has been so good to us-has lent us money even; and but for him we must have starved."

"Good God, Clara!" cried the Captain, aghast, "you don't mean to say you've degraded yourself by borrowing money from a broker's man!"

"What could I do, dear? You left me without any money, you know," replied the wife innocently.

"You really ought to have known better, Clara," said the Captain sternly. "But where is this Jiffins? Let me pay the fellow his confounded loan."

"I think you'd better let me pay it, dear. If you'll give me a tenpound note, I can make it all right."

So Mr. Jiffins received about a thousand per cent for his loan, which had been little more than a sovereign, and he spent New Year's-day very pleasantly in the bosom of his married daughter's household, No. 7

Stamford Mews, Blackfriars. But perhaps at some future audit, when many such small accounts are balanced before the Great Auditor, Mr. Jiffins may receive even more than a thousand per cent for that little loan.

I AM a speculative philosopher, something of a magician, and am given to reading the stars. I dare not claim entire originality in my learned processes, but protest against being charged with a blind following of the lore of Lilly, Cornelius Agrippa, and Doctor Dee. I owe nothing to these worthies, not even pleasant reading. My chamber is neither a laboratory nor a museum of scientific horrors. My table is not hung with black velvet, and is silent enough for a table nowadays; from an upholsterer's point of view, indeed, it is not worth a "rap." There is neither crucible, crocodile, nor mummy to hand; and at a first glance, the visitor might be excused for questioning my calling as a magician, so "unhouselled" am I as regards the furniture of mystery, so utterly bankrupt in the matter of traditional apparatus. Yet none the less am I a conjurer; and the phantoms that I raise " come like shadows, so depart," in the most approved fashion, being seen in all their filmy variety through a crystal.

Mine is a charmed circle, within which only the sacred few may tread. Briefly, and without metaphor, I am a dramatist; and save in the trifling imagery of the crystal as applied to a glass inkstand (which is pretty and pardonable), I have but spoken the literal truth. With eye fixed on that inkstand, I have dreamed dreams, seen visions, drawn them from their vitreous abode and "laid" the ghosts comfortably upon paper. Let my readers be judges of this. Have they never pondered on the fortunes of the Lady Gwendoline?-embalmed for future ages in the leaves of my tragedy in five acts, "The Pride of Penzance, or the Purloined Parchment." Have no

natural tears been shed over the wasting death (through two scenes and a half) of Mabel Sarsnet the Milliner-" Mabel the Mildewed"? The Lady Gwendoline rose up at midnight, before my speculative eye, then intent upon the crystal medium. I saw her, rich, glorified, haughty, petulant; rare vision! But in a moment the glass is blurred as with the vapour of tears. Through the haze I see the Lady Gwendoline yet; but, ah, how changed!-poor, patient, and in a print dress. I caught her to my dramatic heart. I put the fleeting vision upon paper

dressed her in becoming blackand-white-wrote her out; she was read aloud-copied by an infatuated prompter-played divinely by the cleverest of the profession, and you, my reader, went home from the spectacle of the noble martyr's rights and wrongs a sadder, perchance a wiser, man. I owe this to the crystal; for whatever I made of the Lady Gwendoline in after thoughts, I saw her in her "golden prime" first in my magic glass.

Yes! my crystal tells me truly. I am a conjurer-a dramatic Katerfelto in spite of myself. For, mark you this, as a proof of the reality of these visions, though my pen transcribed the woes of the Lady Gwendoline and Mabel the Mildewed, though I in fact put them through their stage "paces," so entirely was the conception of these characters due to the crystal, that no one in that crowded playhouse was more innocently surprised and delighted with the novelty of these presentations than II, the presumed author! What could I do, then, but render up my rights of success to the magic crystal, and lay my pen reverently beside it, in token of leal homage?

But not alone do these pale faces of injured maidenhood or distressed maternity haunt the charmed glass: -strange grotesque countenances thrust themselves between the milliner and her misery mopping and mowing and grinning and chuckling and winking. These shadowy heads have red, short-cropped, stubble hair, their eyes are for ever rolling under the most idioticallyarched brows. What do they here? Shall I bid them avaunt, and retire into the inky lake? And slight the offerings of my crystal? Reject these incongruous phantoms conjured up for me and for my use alone? Never. O bounteous crystal, I take all you send! These chuckle-headed shadows are the comic ingredients of my under-plot; these red-haired winking ghosts relieve the gloom of my domestic dramas; and from these ugly types blossom forth in the fulness of time such creations as Roger, in the "Peerage and the Plough" (in seven acts and a prologue), Simon, Joe, and a host of other dramatic countrymen and low-comedy parts, the exponents of which are all endowed with red "scratch"-wigs and the widest mouths. Hitherto my crystal has been described as presenting distinct images to me for future service in drama; but lo! another phase. Have my readers ever seen-and, if so, do they remember -a strange pen-and-ink sketch by Thomas Hood entitled A Dream;

a confused mass of lines crossing and involving themselves with others, amidst which appear wild faces, so constructed that the chin of one makes the forehead of another, and so on? There are times when I am consulting my crystal, that its prisms reflect such another "congeries." Look as I may for one defined outline, I am doomed to the presentment of a continuous phantasmagoria. The loveliest faces are suddenly replaced by scowling, ruffianly masks, or pale, devilish visages. Bright lights flit across the crystal; and there is a sheen as of gold and jewels. Hues of rainbow variety, never still, but dimpling and repassing, shimmer and tremble on the glass; all a bright chaos without semblance of order or reason. "Now is the crystal false to you," cries the reader; "these ghosts were ever slippery

ware."

Ah, dear friend, you are unlearned in these enchanted gifts-you know not the bounty of my magic glass. Out of this chaos, the more fecund as it is more unreasonable, is born my brightest child-burlesque! My crystal is still true, and the faces I see in my oracular mirror come to be realised at length in the airiest of my creations-ephemeral delights of idle minds, but producers of lasting profit to the dramatist.

And all these, and more, I see "through a crystal."

THE saints who wrought in days of blood,

Whose steps we dimly trace, They sowed for us the holy seeds Of a never-dying grace. Yet legend lives of St. Frediswide, Whom love of Christ did win To rear the cloistral walls adored

By those men of lust and sin.

Her sire was a king of the Saxon time,

Never child than she more dear. One grief he had; no earthly love

Found grace in his daughter's ear. So tearfully smiled the gray old king

As she meekly knelt by his side, And sought his blessing ere she went

To wed with Lord Christ as bride.