ever as the message and the word of a lost heaven!

Clarke Jones did not see that Laurence was in love, and only half suspected that May, who was more impulsive, and had no other motive than obedience for concealment, loved him. Laurence carefully concealed his feelings from the lawyer-he had his own good reasons for doing so-and Jones was too inflated with success to read the heart of another man very accurately, or to have his senses sharpened by the fear of rivalry. He had become accustomed to the belief that everything must give way to his wishes; May Sefton's love among the rest.

Her distress, Clarke Jones's excitement and undisguised insolence of manner, told Laurence all. He put May gently away, and bade her go up to his mother in the Hall; then, livid, and with the expression that he had had when his wife had taunted him on the crags above the Tarn, he turned round, seized Clarke Jones, and with the heavy dog-whip in his hand, flogged him. The lawyer struggled to defend himself; but Laurence was the more powerful man; and now, with his long-smothered passions let loose, and his hatred bracing his nerves and muscles, he was desperately strong. Lash on lash, blow on blow, the whole pent-up heart poured out in blows and words of scorn and insult. At last, wearied with his own passion, he flung the wretch heavily to the ground, and strode up the broad gravel-walk towards the house.

Clarke Jones went home, and for the next fortnight was invisible to every one-"laid up by illness," according to report.

One day it was the afternoon of this very spring day, the happiest of all May's life he stole upon her as she walked, restless with joy, up and down the lane leading to the Hall, recalling every word and look and gesture of that glorious morning, and living over again the divine joy of her hour of betrothal. Startling her from this heaven of thought, Clarke Jones The wedding-day came on quickly. All cause suddenly stood before her. Without a moment's of secrecy was now at an end, and Laurence was warning, in his rude coarse bull-headed way he almost boastful as to publicity. He was not told her that he had a mind for her, that he would himself through it all; he was excited and defiant; make good settlements on her, and that she might talked loud; talked fast; told all his feelings and do worse than take him. He had no grand name intentions in a manner quite unlike his usual relike Laurence Grantley's, certainly, but he had ticent pride, and seemed to find a certain strength an honest one and was a safer man (with a thick of hope, a certain comfort of conviction, in respluttering emphasis), and Laurence Grantley | iterating to all what "he was going to do." would never be husband to her, if that was what But it sounded rather like a challenge given she was thinking of-never! And he snapped to some one, than the natural exposition of a his fingers in the air. man's own mind. The preparations went on, in May's blood was roused. May, all gentleness the same ostentatious way. It was to be a and kindness, flamed up now, infuriate and in-grander marriage than even the first had been. spired by her great love. She spurned the man with the bitterest disgust; hard words rose with dangerous power to her lips; a fierce eloquence possessed her; and Clarke Jones was for a moment overwhelmed at the transformation.

"Ah!" he said at last, drawing a deep breath, "this is because you love Grantley! A word, miss, from me; a word that I could say, and he would be nowhere. A pitiful scoundrel he is a sneaking dog that I hold in my hand, and could crush-there! like that!" setting his heel on a worm that lay in his path. "Yes, with one word I could crush him like that; and by Jove, if you give me the chance-or the cause-I will!"

"How dare you thus insult me?" cried May, with a passionate gesture.

"I don't insult you, miss. If I speak the truth of Laurence Grantley do I insult you? Things have come to a pretty pass! Has that scoundrel been poaching on my manor, I wonder? By Jove, if he has- -I want to know my place,

miss

All this time Clarke Jones was confined to his own house, suffering severely from fever and general indisposition. But, on the morning of the marriage, and while May, in her bridal dress, was waiting to be taken to churchone arm in a sling, his face strapped and bandaged-he limped to the house, and demanded instant speech with her. A heavy bribe got him admitted to where she sat, alone.

:

"Miss May," he said, suddenly.
She started up and gave a cry.

"Come! No screams!" he said, insolently;
'you are in my power at last! Hear me !" He
bent down close to her face. "You are going
to be his wife; to be to him what Annie Sibson
was; to lie by his side where she lay, and to
live on the gold which she brought. One word in
your ear: one word to tell you whom you marry.
Keep still, little bird; see! the very blood has
come from your struggles, and is falling from
your arm on to your dress! Fie! fie! Blood
on your bridal dress? Now keep still, and I'll
tell you a pretty little tale I heard one day on
the cliffs above Black Tarn-keep still, I say,
till I tell you my story."

"Know your place ?" interrupted May; "your place is lower than Mr. Grantley's lowest servant! You desecrate his name by speaking it; He bent his lips to her ear and whispered you are not fit to mention him in any way!" his revelation; then, with a low laugh, cried, May rushed scornfully away through the Grant-"Now go marry Laurence Grantley, with blood ley gate. upon your bridal dress!" and releasing her suddenly, limped out of the room.

She met Laurence in the walk. May threw herself into her lover's arms, crying, "Laurence! save me from that monster!"

A scream rang through the startled house. The bridesmaids and May's mother rushed to her.

Crouched in a corner, white and scared, her hair fallen loose, her eyes wild and fixed, her pale lips muttering "Murder, murder!" and "Laurence!" and the blood dropping heavily on her dress, they found her. Too late. In three days she died.

Years after, Laurence Grantley was seen, a bent aged withered man, standing on the crags above Black Tarn. The man who saw him-old Deedham's son-spoke to him, but Laurence did not answer, and was never seen again. During that same summer, the waters drying more than usual, a dead man's hand lay uncovered in the Tarn; and men whispered to each other that it was the hand of the former owner of Grantley Hall. No one cared to verify the suspicion, and the grave of the last of the Grantleys is still unfilled in the family mausoleum.

MYNHEER VAN PRIG.

WHATEVER could have brought Mynheer van Prig and your humble servant in contact? The world was surely wide enough for Prig and self. What unkind fortune, what capricious fate, what wilful wind, could have blown us together? I could well have done without Van Prig, and he might properly have done without me. I wanted nothing with the man: why couldn't he let me alone? If Van Prig had let me be, I should never have written this paper, and he-on my account at least-would never have been delivered over to the tormentors. Thus two (possible) evils would have been prevented. But the Pascal influences were against us. There was a cohobation of Sol with the White Dragon in Balneo Mariæ, and the result of the projection was Van Prig. Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis, ruled otherwise. It was fated that Van Prig and I were to meet, and that we should both be sufferers from our very short acquaintance. May the public be the only parties that will derive any benefit from the disastrous connexion of the non-undersigned with Mynheer van Prig.

him, try him by a banjo and tambourine head court-martial, and, on his being convicted of being white, to skin him alive, cook, and eat him. Prior to the first great French Revolution, if a foreigner died on the hospitable soil of France, the first intimation of the fact that reached his heirs was accompanied by the consoling intimation that the Most Christian King had condescended to exercise the eminently infamous prerogative known as the Droit d'Aubaine, and that his exempts had laid violent hands upon all goods and chattels, moneys and securities, belonging to the foreigner deceased. Again, there are some travellers whom an instinct of cruelty leads to watch and pry into the operation of the criminal law abroad. They are of the family of that horrible amateur of agony, George Selwyn, who, when the wretched Damiens was to be tortured, scarified, and dismembered, posted to Paris to witness the concluding bedevilment of the would-be regicide; and, desiring to be as near the scaffold as possible, gave his name to the sentinels who were keeping the crowd back as "Monsieur de Londres." They, knowing that the title "Monsieur de Paris" was shared alike by the archbishop-metropolitan and by the common executioner, thought, reasoning from analogy, that the strange gentleman might be either the Primate of England or else the Sieur Jean Ketch on his travels, and so admitted him within the "inner ring," where he could witness, at his ease, the final atrocities. There are tourists in our days who experience a keen pleasure in hanging about the court of some Egyptian cadi, to see some miserable fellah receive the bastinado. They pay five-and-twenty francs for the successor of Sanson to exhibit to them the dull red timbers and shining grooves of the guillotine. They go, at Nuremberg, to see the headsman's sword, with the hollow blade that holds quicksilver in its cavity, to drive the momentum from hilt to point; and, in Russia, their valet de place gives them timely intimation of some peculiarly invigorating administration of the stick to refractory servants, or drunken donkey-drivers, in the yard of the police-office: or of some gala day, when the condign punishment of the knout is to be publicly inflicted in the horsemarket at the top of the Newskoi perspective.

The master of the ceremonies who introduced me to Mynheer van Prig had Law for his name, and was the criminal law of the constitutional kingdom of Belgium.

Nearly four years have passed since then. I don't exactly know why I had come to Brussels, save that I entertained a very great disinclination to return to England just then. All the

He who travels much abroad, and is worth anything as a traveller, will scarcely fail to make himself, to the best of his ability, acquainted with the systems of jurisprudence which prevail in the countries he traverses. Landing in Barataria, one of our earliest visits should be to the plenary court, where his Excellency el Gobernador Don Sancho Panza sits full of wisdom and garlic. On crossing the Styx, the traveller is compelled to put in an appearance before Minos, C.J., and Justices Rhadamanthus and Eachus, in banco. It is true that a great many modes exist of performing this duty, and that the manner of study-spring and summer I had been wandering in the ing the administration of justice in divers countries is infinitely varied. Young Anacharsis is sometimes launched into a lawsuit so soon as he has set foot on Grecian shore; and I have heard of a ferocious tribe of island blackamoors whose strict, but simple, code compels them on a European making his appearance among them to seize

far north of Europe, and I thought I might as well wait until the first days of December, ere I went home. So, Paris having no charms for me at that period, I elected Brussels as a restingplace for eight weeks. I didn't know a soul in the city at first, which was remarkably nice. I discovered an acquaintance one day in the

Place de la Monnaie, whom I suspected to have and quarter-pay captains, and English raff's of come over on an excursion trip to some international congress then being held in the capital of King Leopold. Him I discreetly avoided; which was pleasant and convenient. True, when I had been in Brussels about a month I came suddenly across a real friend, who was camping out at the suburb of St. Josse-ten-Noode. I was obliged to go and dine with him and make believe to be intimate with his family; but I soon contrived to get up a snug little quarrel with my friend—a querelle d'Allemand, or rather de Belge, for we neither of us knew precisely what it was about; and then, after we had abused each other with the worst grace in the world, I was quite alone, which was delightfully humanising. At last it pleased Mynheer van Prig -and be hanged to him—to shunt himself across my solitary path.

every description, came to read the Times, and talk about horses and bills, and drink the best Belgian substitute for English gin-and-water. And then I went home to some nice desolate quarters I had at a hairdresser's shop in the Rue de la Montagne. The hairdresser was a blind man, and his apprentice used to make faces at him in the intervals of dressing those wigs on the dummies. The hairdresser's wife was ordinarily in tears; when her eyes were dry, she was in a storming passion, and thrashing her children with a "martinet." I used to sing God save the Queen, in the endeavour to drown their yells, which disturbed the digestion of the six courses and the sour faro. My bedroom was like Mr. Punch's show; it was tall, narrow, and dark, and had but a half door covered with green baize. I had a charcoal stove in my sitting apartment, and nearly managed to asphyxiate myself with the fumes thereof. I had an effigy of a black Madonna with three hands, and a black bambino set in silvered copper, with a lamp swinging before it which had come from Kieff, and a fur coat that weighed about half a hundred-weight, and a pair of boots four feet high, lined with sheepskin, and with which I used to compare notes at night. I had a quantity of books in half a dozen languages

For a time I enjoyed all the pleasures of a Low Dutch Zimmerman. It was so comfortable to be alone. I wouldn't have anything to do with the bad high-priced dinners at the spurious French restaurants in the Galerie St. Hubert, or the jangling tables d'hôte at the great hotels; not I. But I dined royally in the Flemish manner at a little eating-house in a back street, that might have been the main cabin in a Greenland whaler, so greasy was it, and where I had six courses of adipose matter, any quantity of black bread and pickled vegetables, a plank of cheese of which the smell alone would have blown up Waltham Abbey if there were cheese instead of powder mills there, and a white wash-hand jug full of faro beer, such as would, for its sourness, have set all the grinders of the Giant Bolivorax, to say nothing of the teeth of a whole Port Royal full of ground sharks, on edge—all for ninepence halfpenny. And it didn't make me bilious. I hadn't turned the corner of thirty years then. I played billiards or dominoes every night with people I didn't know, and liked to play with Walloons rather than with Flemings; for the reason, you see, that I understood a little Flemish, and that the Walloon tongue is one which nobody on earth, save the natives and deaf and dumb people, can speak. Sometimes, I went to the Maison des Brasseurs on the Grande Place, and breakfasted on a "beuifsteackox," the orthography by printed placard adopted for the edible known in the country as a beefsteak. Sometimes I smoked a pipe on a dingy estaminet opposite the corner of the Rue de l'Etuve, and, looking upon the famous little Mannekin, wished I could be appointed his valet de chambre to dress him in his three suits a year-how do they get his netherstocks on?and his cross of St. Louis; or that I could be his homme d'affaires to manage his handsome revenues in a snug bureau panelled with walnut-wood; and I wondered who the rich old maids and bur- I owed no money in Brussels-and how, ingomasters could have been who had left legacies deed, anybody can get into debt where rent and and yearly "rentes" to the "plus ancien bour-food are so cheap, and where cigars are three for geois de Bruxelles." A great haunt of mine was a penny, puzzles me. Else I might have become a half-English tavern off the Montagne de la acquainted with the swift and sharp Debtor and Cour, whither grooms, and broken-down baronets, Creditor Law of Belgium, and have mingled with

"Ave, Tauchnitz! Imperator, te saluto!"-on the floor, and a quantity of loose tobacco on the furniture generally; and I got up and went to bed at all hours; and, if I hadn't paid my rent in advance, I think the landlady must have imagined that I was mad. I had my complaints against her, too; for I am sure she made the pomatum in the vessels she used for cooking the dinner; and the mingled odour of bear's-grease and cabbage-soup was dreadful. I was to do a great deal of writing, and bought a large stock of pens and paper, and seven kinds of ink. I meant to paint some pictures illustrating recent foreign pilgrimages of my own, and I laid in large quantities of pigments and hog's-hair brushes; but I don't think I either wrote or painted much. The major part of my time at home was devoted to smoking, reading, and keeping a minutely accurate journal of the things I hadn't done. A young musical gentleman once came to my hermitage-which was on the fourth floor-with a letter of introduction from England; but I leaped up at him like a smoky Frankenstein, and soon gave that peaceable but obtrusive fiddler his quietus. Oh, it was a jovial time, a merry time! So merry, indeed, that I was often uncertain in my mind as to whether I should jump for joy and sing continual Te Deums, or whether I should pitch myself out of the fourth floor window, and dash my brains out against the flags of the Rue de la Montagne.

head. He spoke very thick, which might have been his misfortune only, seeing that he was a Belgian; and he asked me, in execrable French, the way to the Cathedral of St. Gudule.

I told him, with my usual mildness, that he was some two miles distant from that ancient fane; whereupon, with many a reel and hiccup, he suggested that I should treat him with beer or schnaps. I declined; whereupon he cursed me for an Englishman, and lurched away. It was not until he was some ten yards ahead of me, scudding away in the moonlight with a direct swiftness very unlike a tipsy man, that I discovered that this villanous mynheer--he became then and there, and for ever afterwards, to my mind, Van Prig-had picked my pocket. I had much better have let it alone, but I gave

another section of English raffs, in the Maison de Détention pour Dettes. My "relations" with the police were of the most tranquillising description. I assured a stout gentleman in a glazed cap, at the passport office of the Petits Sablons, that I considered the Emperor Napoleon to be the greatest man this world has seen since Alexander of Macedon; and as I had just returned from the most absolutist country in Europe, I was probably looked upon as a pacific character. So I took my walks abroad, unmolested, and made my first acquaintance with Belgian law one October afternoon, when, ascending the Montagne de la Cour, I witnessed the edifying spectacle of a little ragged boy-a pure Belgian gamin-being arrested by a police agent in plain clothes, for the flagrant misdeed of begging. The tiny criminal had ventured to accost an English lady and gen-chase. I have run away from a good many things tleman who were coming out of a lace-shop, when in my time-from love, from happiness, from a seeming well-to-do bourgeois, with green spec-myself-but I have seldom run after anybody or tacles and a drab broad-brim, rushed across the anything. But I cried havoc, and let slip the road, pursued the small ragamuffin among the dogs of war, after Van Prig: for the rascal had wheels of several carriages and the hoofs of a positively stolen all the money I had in the world. squadron of Belgian heavy cavalry, and, at last, I think the available "all" amounted to about run him down on a pastrycook's door-step. I five-and-twenty francs, Belgian currency, connever saw such an illustration of abject, ex-tained in a morocco porte-monnaie; but this had, hausted terror, as in the boy as he sprawled in addition, one compartment filled with what panting on the step, holding up his ragged little North of England people call "bonny money :” arm as if to avert an expected blow. There was an assortment of small change of a special nasome sympathy evinced among the crowd that ture which I had picked up during my wanderimmediately collected, and a few murmurs reflect-ings. Thus, I had a kreutzer, and a silver grosing on "les mouchards" were heard; but the police agent and a very decent kind of man he seemed-put the case very fairly to us: that his orders were to arrest all vagrants and mendicants, and that the boy was captured, not to be punished, but to be sent to an asylum where he would be educated and cared for, till he was eighteen years of age. He took off his prisoner, and I went on my way: thinking that it was, perhaps, better, after all, to catch up these little beggars and lug them away to a place where they should be fed and taught, than to suffer them shamefully to roam in "all the desolate freedom of the wild ass" about the streets of crowded cities, to grow up into wolves and tigers preying upon the body politic. I was out late that evening and night, and walked many miles. It must have been near the Porte de Cologne, and at half-past one o'clock in the morning, that I met Mynheer van Prig.

Mynheer van Prig-I can see him now staggering along, and throwing a long lurching shadow in the bright moonlight-was either very tipsy, or else, for purposes of his own, simulated extreme inebriety. He caught hold of posts, and of chairs, and of trees, as he came tacking towards me, and, finally, he drifted up against and caught hold of me. He was at least six feet high-I won't say in his stockings, because subsequent discoveries proved him to be in the habit of wearing sabots without hose. He wore a very ragged blouse, and had a white flat face without beard or moustache, and, to the extent that a dirty Greek cap would admit of examination, without any perceptible hair on his

chen, and a Danish rigsdaler, a pfenning, a five kopeck piece, a Hamburg mark, a piece with the effigy of the Hanoverian White Horse, and some minor testoons. Mynheer van Prig had got them all; and as I naturally set store by my fiveand-twenty francs, and the pretty little tiny kickshaws of "bonny money," I ran after him.

Mynheer van Prig doubled; and we had an agreeable game of catch 'em who can, on the broad boulevard. I shouted "Police!" and "Au secours!" but all Brussels seemed to have gone to bed. Then, Mynheer van Prig took an unhandsome advantage of his size and my unreadiness, and, butting at me with his large head, very nearly knocked me off my legs. I am ashamed to say that in my ignorance of the noble art of self-defence, I caught hold of my adversary by the ears, and by the scruff of his neck, and by the collar and breast of his blouse, and that I strove to trip his long legs up: hanging on to him, meanwhile, like grim death, and bellowing "Au secours!"

It was destined to be a running fight through- │ out; for anon, and to my great joy, I descried | another figure running towards us. Up he came at last, in a cocked-hat and out of breath, and, mild as the moonbeams, he summoned Mynheer van Prig, in the name of the king and of the law, to surrender.

How did he know that Van P. was the guilty party? I became ashamed of my opponent. There ! was surely never so rank a coward in the world as Mynheer van Prig. The police-officer was a mere atomy of a sergent de ville; and Prig, to

judge by the size and length of his limbs, might have beaten us both, with one hand tied behind him. But he began, instead, to blubber like a great baby, about his "vamille."

Now we have thee as a filou. Bon. Let him be peeled (qu'on l'épluche)," he concluded.

And upon my word they proceeded to "peel" Mynheer van Prig; and very much like a forked radish he looked when every rag-and they were few in number-he had on, was peeled off. Four

I explained my loss, but the little policeman seemed to know all about it already. "Ça y est!" "That's it!" seemed his favourite mode of ex-five-franc pieces, presumably mine, and the whole pression. He chucked Mynheer van Prig almost caressingly under the chin, but shook his head, and said the money was not there. As for the porte-monnaie, it was settled that Prig had thrown it away, as a preliminary proceeding. "So, allons," said the little policeman blithely, "en route!"

He first, with much formality, went through the ceremony of taking the big blubbering Belgian into custody. This he effected, by drawing a tapering little spit of a rapier and collaring Mynheer van Prig-having very nearly to stand on tiptoe to do it. We were admitted into Brussels by the men on duty at the Porte de Cologne, where the policeman showed his prize, and was complimented by the officials in Flemish. To me he spoke very decent French.

By this time I was heartily sick of Mynheer van Prig, and wanted, if possible, to get my money back, and go to bed. I made proposals that P. should restore the gems, or rather coins, of which he had robbed me, should receive a kicking, and depart in peace; but this was a plan of which, though Van assented, the policeman would not hear. We must go before the commissary. It was a serious affair.

of my "bonny money," of which I had "préalablement" given a description to the commissary, were found in the left sabot of Mynheer van Prig. There could be no doubt about that person's guilt.

The defence he pleaded, varied in its nature. First, he said that he had never seen me before; then, that he was as innocent as the child unborn; then, that it was somebody else; then, that I had given him the money to drink the health of the martyrs of Belgian liberty; finally, he burst into a fresh flood of tears, and virtually confessing his offence, called it a "betite indiscrétion."

I

The commissary stigmatised his "voie de défense" as "odious." Mynheer van Prig was permitted to resume his peel, and was then locked up-somewhere underground, I presume. signed a number of documents, bade the commissary good night, and was free to depart: when I made the agreeable discovery that my latch-key had disappeared. Either Van had stolen that too, and had thrown it away, or I had lost it during my short struggle with him. Most of the houses in Brussels have no concierges, but have street doors in the English fashion. I did not like to knock up the hairdresser's family; I was doubtful as to my reception-for the funds taken from Van Prig had been rigorously impounded by the commissary-at an hotel; and I was very glad, as an alternative to walking about the streets, to accept the offer of the policeman to make interest with the chef d'escouade at the guard-house at the Hôtel de Ville. There was, in an immense apartment, a roaring fire in an antique chimney "Bad seed, bad grain," the minister of justice here, and I dozed on a wooden camp-bed till went on, sententiously. "Thy mother stole cat- seven in the morning: now fancying that I saw skins. Thy father wore rings on his legs for the Duke of Alva warming his toes by the blaze: seven and ten. Thy sister is inscrite. Bad sub-now, that the nodding police-agents were the night jects, all. But Monsieur le Commissaire is about to rub thine ears for thee, galopin."

"And one that will be five years for thee, Gewaert," observed the policeman, cheerfully, to his prisoner, as we clattered down the empty

streets.

The Mynheer, whose christian or surname might have been Gewaert, but who to me could be nothing but Van Prig, only gave some inarticulate moanings by way of reply.

It is a fact, that when we reached the bureau of the commissary of police, and that functionary had got out of bed, and had come down stairs to his murky office in a flannel dressing-gown and a velvet skull-cap, and the charge had been briefly explained to him, that he so far put into practice the figurative language of the policeman concerning the rubbing of Mynheer van Prig's ears, as to seize him by the two shoulders and shake that rascal violently

watch that Rembrandt painted.

For a whole fortnight afterwards, I heard nothing whatever of Mynheer van Prig. The commissary had told me that when justice required my presence I should receive a 66 sommation;" and I dreaded the arrival of the missive. For fourteen days, however, as I have said, there were no signs of proceedings in re Prig. Yet the Mynheer haunted me. I had never prosecuted anybody before, and I hope I never shall again. I groaned in the spirit perpetually, about Mynheer van Prig. By night and by day his gaunt figure, his fat white face, floated before me. Prig was my Bottle Imp; and it was with a sensation, after all this horror, approaching relief, that on returning home one day, I learned from the landlady that a huissier had been after me with a sommation.

I think the entire hairdresser's family must