with a ringing laugh. "In life, as on the stage, the petticoat interest is always the strongest.

"I don't agree with you there," said Kenelm, dryly. "And you seem to me to utter a claptrap beneath the rank of your understanding. However, this warm weather indisposes one to disputation; and I own that a petticoat, provided it be red, is not without the interest of colour in a picture."

"Well, young gentleman," said the minstrel, rising, "the day is wearing on, and I must wish you good-bye; probably, if you were to ramble about the country as I do, you would see too many pretty girls not to teach you the strength of petticoat interest -not in pictures alone; and should I meet you again, I may find you writing loveverses yourself."

"After a conjecture so unwarrantable, I part company with you less reluctantly than I otherwise might do. But I hope we shall meet again."

"Your wish flatters me much, but, if we

in

you,

do, pray respect the confidence I have placed and regard my wandering minstrelsy and my dog's tray as sacred secrets. Should we not so meet, it is but a prudent reserve on my part if I do not give you my right name and address."

"There you show the cautious commonsense which belongs rarely to lovers of verse and petticoat interest. What have you done with your guitar?"

"I do not pace the roads with that instrument it is forwarded to me from town to town under a borrowed name, together with other raiment than this, should I have cause to drop my character of wandering minstrel."

The two men here exchanged a cordial shake of the hand. And as the minstrel went his way along the river-side, his voice in chanting seemed to lend to the wavelets a livelier murmur, to the reeds a less plaintive sigh.

CHAPTER XVIII.

In his room, solitary and brooding, sate the defeated hero of a hundred fights. It was now twilight; but the shutters had been partially closed all day, in order to exclude the sun, which had never before been unwelcome to Tom Bowles, and they still remained so, making the twilight doubly twilight, till the harvest moon, rising early, shot its ray through the crevice, and forced a silvery track amid the shadows of the floor.

The man's head drooped on his breast, his strong hands rested listlessly on his knees; his attitude was that of utter despondency and prostration. But in the expression of his face there were the signs of some dangerous and restless thought which belied, not the gloom but, the stillness of the posture.

His brow, which was habitually open and frank, in its defying aggressive boldness, was now contracted into deep furrows, and lowered darkly over his downcast, half-closed eyes. His lips were so tightly compressed that the face lost its roundness, and the massive bone of the jaw stood out hard and salient. Now and then, indeed, the lips opened, giving vent to a deep, impatient sigh, but they reclosed as quickly as they had parted. It was one of those crises in life which find all the elements that make up a man's former self in lawless anarchy; in which the Evil One seems to enter and direct the storm; in which a rude untutored mind, never before harbouring a thought of crime, sees the crime start up from an abyss, feels it to be an enemy, yet yields to it as a fate. So that when, at the last, some wretch, sentenced to the gibbet, shudderingly looks back to the moment that trembled between two worlds'-the world of the man guiltless, the world of the man guilty-he says to the holy, highly educated, rational, passionless

VOL. I.

Y

priest who confesses him and calls him 'brother," "The devil put it into my head."

At that moment the door opened; at its threshold there stood the man's mother— whom he had never allowed to influence his conduct, though he loved her well in his rough way—and the hated fellow-man whom he longed to see dead at his feet. The door reclosed, the mother was gone, without a word, for her tears choked her; the fellowman was alone with him. Tom Bowles looked up, recognised his visitor, cleared his brow, and rubbed his mighty hands.