"Who is that? Philip?"

Soon after, a visitor (probably Cousin Turvill, almost his only friend) came in, and, going to his bedside, called several times, "Major! Major!" but getting no answer, he at last drew back the dingy curtains. The bed was streaming with blood; it lay everywhere in coagulated pools on the counterpane. The wretched man was dying. He had balked the hangman of his fees. A surgeon was sent for; Hooper ran like a madman for him. Philip staunched a deep gash in the wrist, which the desperate man had cut with the penknife which had mended the pen with which he had made his will. It was too late. The Major was gone.

SARAH MALCOLM.

In one of the snug compartments, tapestried with pictures, of the Historical Portrait Exhibition opened a few years ago at South Kensington, the visitor came suddenly upon a woman's face that at once fascinated and repelled him. There was a hard shamelessness about the full rounded forehead; the eyes. were steely and fixed like those of a bird of prey, the thin compressed lips were stern and cruel. Mr. Tom Taylor, that admirable art-critic, says the face has something of a Lady Macbeth expression, and so it has-it is Lady Macbeth as she would have been in common life. The forbidding woman wears, if we remember right, a low-cut gown, and her bosom is covered with the modest and simple muslin tucker of that time; she sits bare-armed at a table, and her hands are pressed together in a peculiar way, expressing a stubborn, unrepentant resolution. That woman is Sarah Malcolm; she is in the condemned cell. The picture was painted by Hogarth when he was about thirty-five, perhaps the very day that he went to Newgate to watch through the spiked hatch for a typical face for his Idle Apprentice.

On Thursday, the 2nd of February, 1733, a certain Mrs. Francis Rhymer went to call upon Mrs. Lydia Duncomb, an old widow with some property, who lived with her two servants, Elizabeth Harrison, an old maid, her companion, and Ann Price, a girl of about seventeen, in Tanfield Court, a mere passage still existing in the Temple.

Tanfield Court is a little dark bin with the roof off. The older part of the Temple, to a lively imagination, is not very unlike the shaft of a mine, lawyers honeycombing its sides with their square dens. It is not a cheerful place; but it does to store parchments in, and to secrete Chancery papers and calf-bound law-books. Being dark, it is not so easy to

see when a lawyer blushes or refuses a poor person's fee there as it would be in sunnier and brighter places. To a rich old laundress or a lawyer's widow habit might, however, render its sordid and dismal dimness bearable. Past happiness consecrates the shadiest places, and perhaps to Mrs. Lydia Duncomb, Tanfield Court was a dear old spot, not to be left without almost a tearing up of the heart-strings.

Mrs. Rhymer had known Mrs. Duncomb for thirty long years of joy and sorrow. She had come there to take tea and chat and discuss business, for the old lady had appointed her executrix, and there were papers to look over. For the last three or four years Mrs. Duncomb had become very infirm, and her memory had decayed; so Mrs. Rhymer received her money for her, and took care of it. When Mrs. Betty and Nanny are gone into the second room, leaving the old bare wainscoted apartment, in which the bed rises up like a great curtained catafalque, and the high-backed chairs throw long black slanting shadows on the walls, and even the quaint fire-irons have ghostly distorted doubles of their own under the scant candlelight, there is an overhauling of Mrs. Duncomb's strong black box. The old lady, sitting propped up by the fireside, asks if Mrs. Rhymer has got the key, for she wants a little money-about a guinea. The box by the bedside is then solemnly opened by Mrs. Rhymer, who kneels to open it. There is at the top a silver tankard, one of the last relics of Mrs. Duncomb's husband; and in this tankard is a hundred pounds; also a bag with twenty guineas or so in it.

Mrs. Rhymer takes the bag to the fireside, and puts a guinea into the old lady's weak and trembling hand. There are also in the box six little parcels sealed with black waxmoney (two or three guineas in each) put by for special uses, after her death; for the old widow knows that, before long, two men in black must stand sentinels in Tanfield Court, and a certain long black vehicle wait for somebody, some morning, outside the Temple gate. The old lady, faltering, repeats the purpose for which each is set apart-twenty guineas for her burial, eighteen moidores for any extraordinary charges, and the thirty or forty shillings in a green purse to be given to certain poor people. It is not a pleasant or cheerful thing to have to talk of such matters. But Mrs. Duncomb is anxious for all things at her decease to be done kindly, decorously, and respectably. With occasional lapses of memory and pauses when she is tired, she arranges the whole to her wish. The black box is then again closed, and kind, sensible Mrs. Rhymer takes her leave.

That is on the Thursday. On the Friday, Mrs. Oliphant, a

laundress, calls on Mrs. Duncomb about eight o'clock, and finds her very weak, nervous, and low. Mrs. Love, an old friend, is sitting with her. She tells Mrs. Oliphant and Mrs. Love, the latter of whom is coming to dine with Mrs. Duncomb on Sunday evening, that she is sorry Mrs. Oliphant's master, Mr. Grisly, whose chambers are opposite, has gone, and has left his keys with Mr. Twysden, to let the room, because it seems so lonesome. Mrs. Betty, the old servant, is sitting at the fire in rather a moping way too, and with her sits a good-looking yet somewhat hard and malign charwoman named Malcolm, who before Christmas worked for Mrs. Duncomb, and who has come to ask after the health of her old mistress. Her eyes turn often to the black box, and then glance to the fire and stare at the red coals, and remain fixed in a sullen thoughtful way. Mrs. Betty, who is ill, says ruefully to Mrs. Oliphant:

"My mistress talks of dying, and would have me die with her."

This sort of conversation is not invigorating in a dimlylighted wainscoted room on a cold complaining February night; so after vainly trying to cheer up the two old invalids, whose minds seem to run sympathetically on the same painful subject, Mrs. Oliphant gets up to go. The silent, thinlipped charwoman rises too, with one last clinging look at the mysterious black box and the lock of the door; and says to Mrs. Oliphant

"I will go down with you."

The two visitors go down together at a little before eight, part in Tanfield Court, and are received outside the Temple doorway, two human atoms, into the great ocean of life that flows along Fleet Street ceaselessly from dark to dark.

On Sunday morning, Mr. Gehagan, a young Irish barrister who has chambers on the third floor, over the Alienation Office, in Tanfield Court, opposite a set occupied by a friend of his named Kerrel, talks to his laundress, that same young woman whom we saw at Mrs. Duncomb's, and who comes about nine o'clock to do up the rooms and light the fire. A few moments afterwards Kerrel goes across to his friend Gehagan's bedside, and says, jokingly, alluding to a last night's tavern debate: "You were a good advocate for me last night, and I will give you a breakfast."

He then sends Sarah with a shilling to buy some tea; she returns, makes it, and stays till the horn blows (according to a quaint custom then prevalent in the Temple) for commons. After commons, the two friends stroll out together for a walk in the river-side gardens immortalised by Shakespeare.

Exactly at one on that Sunday, Mrs. Love, neat and trim as a Quaker, comes to dine in Tanfield Court. She is very pnnctual it is exactly one o'clock by the great dials, and the St. Dunstan giants have just done their lightest work, and struck out with their clubs, ONE-sharp, clear, and loud. Mrs. Love shuffles across the paved court, and at last reaches the special door with the name Lydia Duncomb in black on the door-post. No savoury smell of dinner greets her. She ascends the old dusty ink-splashed stairs;-one flight-that is Mr. Knight's door. Silent, all out for the Sunday; second flight, she rests; third flight, here is the landing at last, and welcome enough to her poor old knees. There is Mr. Grisly's name still over his door-he is going to leave; and facing it, again, the well-known name Mrs. Lydia Duncomb.

It is singular, though, as they cannot all have gone to church, that Mrs. Duncomb's outer door is shut-an accident, no doubt. Mrs. Love knocks with the confidence of a punctual visitor, true to the dinner hour. No answer! It is very silent and lonesome there at the top of the house, on the cold landing opposite Mr. Grisly's unoccupied chambers. A chill creeping of the blood comes over Mrs. Love. Five, ten, fifteen minutes' more knocking. No answer. Something must be the matter. Nanny must be out, and Mrs. Betty ill in bed, too infirm to come to the door, and too weak to call out loud enough to be heard. Down the three flights at last trots Mrs. Love, to see if she can find anybody who has seen any one of the family that morning. In the court whom should she meet but Mrs. Oliphant, and she asks her at once.

"No," said Mrs. Oliphant, "I have seen none of them; you'd better knock louder."

Up again goes Mrs. Love, feeling sure that they will now be stirring. Still all silent up the great stairs. She knocks again, nervously fast, till the whole staircase re-echoes, and from every empty room there seem to come voices-shadowy faint voices-but no articulate answer. She waits. No answer. Mrs. Betty must have died in the night. Mrs. Duncomb is confined to her bed. Nanny is gone to tell her sister, and get a woman to lay out the body. Such is the theory Mrs. Love spins in a moment, and takes comfort, albeit somewhat vexed about dinner. Again she toddles downstairs and goes to Mrs. Rhymer, and tells her; then they both return, nervously anxious, and try to push the door open. But it will not open, and still-still-there is no answer from within. Then Mrs. Love goes to a lattice window-the window of the passage looking out into the court-to see if any one can be got to help. Yes; there at "my Lord Bishop of Bangor's