concerned about the returns of the killed and wounded; and, going away next morning, he actually made a present of his splendid doublebarrel-one of Joe Manton's best-to young Charteris, of the 95th, who had been loud in its praises when he saw the execution it did in the Ernham coppices. Charteris was thenceforward Eustace's sworn friend (the vows being all on one side), and stood up for him sturdily at the clubs, and dinner-parties, pigeon-shootings, cock-fightings, and wheresoever rational men do most congregate. He would never endure that his hero should be called exclusive, and that sort of thing. 'Pon Charteris' honour, he thought Eustace the best-natured, most accessible fellow in the world-ten times more so than that intolerable Orpington, who had passed the young lieutenant in Piccadilly, and positively looked through him at the pavement and carriages beyond.

All this time, the subject of Charteris' commendations is, himself, looking steadfastly into the eyes, or where the eyes of that death's head once had been.

"How many commonplaces have been sung and penned, ay, and preached about thee, O ruined tenement of a soul!" ejaculated Eustace, as he poised the grinning skull in that hand, the possession of which was an object of emulation with so many of the fairest of the "Fair.” "How many musers," he continued, "from Hamlet downwards, and upwards, too, have deemed themselves to have fathomed the truth that lies within those deep eye-caverns of thine, as in unsunn'd wells! "Wert thou monk?" he continued, as earnestly as though he expected an answer:-"monk, lordling, or labourer? Wert thou the founder of the place, or some mighty baron, or effeminate courtier, with curled locks, and pointed shoes chained to thy girdle? Didst gain the prize at pel-quintain, or spell out the psalter in vellum-bound folio with brazen clasps? What gained thee the privilege to be laid, with thy other bones, among the cloistered dead? Speak!"-touching with his forefinger the tenantless dome of a soul dispossessed for perhaps five hundred years:-"What were thy daily thinkings, so long ago? What purposes were imagined and moulded within the busy workshop of the brain that held its seat here, within this empty brow? What visions floated before the marvellous organs of sight, that have perished from those eye-holes? Oh, Ecclesiastes, son of David, King of Jerusalem! Well didst thou preach: Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas! Emptiness of emptinesses! Why, here we have a paraphrase of the words, without aid from commentator :-an empty butterfly of a living man, dangling in his idle hand an empty skull!"

At this moment a voice, in measured tones, so as not to attract the notice of the receding watchman, addressed him from the street below.

"ARE you

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SMALL HOURS.

to be seen so late, Mr. Eustace ?"

Eustace replaced the death's head carefully on the table, and leaned out of the open window. A dark figure stood under the balcony. Those were the days of dim oil-lamps in the streets of London, as well as of "Charlies" and watch-boxes. The summer night was without a moon; and Eustace had some difficulty in determining what manner of man was addressing him. But he was not long in doubt; for he who had interrupted his soliloquy said, in a quiet tone: "Morton."

"Father Morton!" repeated the other, in surprise; "who could have thought you kept such fashionable hours? Yes; of course, I am at home to you. Come in, if you care to visit this small chapel of ease to the great Temple of Vanity," added he, with a light laugh.

He ran down the narrow stairs, flung open the hall-door, and greeted Morton by seizing him warmly with both hands.

No small tribute, this, from one who was not much given to the ceremony of hand-shaking. Two or three passive fingers made up what he considered a fair allowance for most people; few had achieved Eustace's entire hand. "His majesty's hand," Norris spitefully remarked, " was reserved for crowned heads." Norris was quite out there, however. It was not station, nor imperial titles, that won Eustace's regard, but simply character, wherever he found it. And it was because he found it so seldom, and so heartily despised the throng of little pasteboard men, kings, lords, or commons, his cotemporariestoo much so, indeed, for a perfect character-that our hero was accounted supercilious and unapproachable. Draw near to him, O honest and genuine son of Adam-man composed of heart, not of stays, man with a head, not merely with "a gatherin' as ha-an't coome to a head"-so his north-country groom is accustomed to define it— and you will see with what hearty warmth George Eustace will greet you. But this is a digression.

The priest and the man of fashion stood together in the street, under the oil-lamp that made darkness visible.

"Qua-arter pa-ast two-o-o!" drawled out a distant guardian of the night, in tones which elderly men may still recall as having partly interrupted, partly soothed, their childish slumbers in the London of fifty or sixty years ago.

"Time for all good boys to be in bed," laughed Eustace; "but you do not escape without a glass of Burgundy. Come up, or we shall be apprehended by Dogberry, and finish our adventures in the round house."

Up Eustace's narrow stairs comes Morton, the priest, winding his

way, while his host leads him by the hand. Father Morton had, indeed, lately trodden a more difficult ascent-the rotten and groaning stair that led to a squalid garret in one of those rookeries that lie in frightful neighbourhood to London's most gorgeous and luxurious palaces. London? but in truth there are many Londons within the area of those few statutable miles. The moral distance between them, say, between Bethnal-green and Berkeley-square, Whitehall and Whitechapel, is like that of opposite shores of the Atlantic. They are far away below the horizon, each of the other.

Could you find a more distinct representation of those two cities, severed absolutely, yet welded together in one compact brick Babylon, than the two men who now stood facing each other in that small drawing-room? Eustace felt it, as he courteously, even respectfully, motioned his visitor to a chair.

"Priest and butterfly!" said he, with a laugh that had little of levity in it, except the tone. "And, to interpret us both, grim death!" He pointed to the skull on the table between them.

"Grim death interprets, at least, much of my life and experience, Mr. Eustace," remarked Morton, rather gravely. "I am rather often in contact with that last moment of our existence here, which I will not call 'grim,' but which is certainly solemn to all, and has a power about it to make a thoughtful man one shade more thoughtful. I am just come, moreover, from the house of death."

Eustace made a half-unconscious movement in his chair, and glanced at the death's head.

"There is a book, you know," pursued the priest, with a smile— and Morton's smile had something very benign, and could be cheery, even, on occasion—" a book that both of us acknowledge to come with all authority; and it tells us the self-same thing: 'It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting: for in that we are put in mind of the end of all, and the living thinketh what is to come.' You are not," he added, with a half-look of mild inquiry, "you, at least, are not under the dominion of a common, but most mistaken, prejudice, that a priest is shy of quoting that sacred volume ?"

"My dear sir," answered Eustace, " do me the justice to suppose, until the contrary is proved against me, that I am free from several of the prejudices which afflict so many of my countrymen regarding your faith, and your consequent position among us."

"Afflict?-an appropriate word," remarked the priest, goodhumouredly.

"My mother, you must know, was French, and held your faith. devoutly," said Eustace.

"Ah!" cried Morton, as if with an irresistible impulse, then stopped again.

Eustace glanced at the portrait that hung above them. The priest's eyes followed. Reading the inscription, he then turned to read his companion's features. The young man's eyes were suffused with a momentary emotion, as he continued gazing on the portrait of his mother. The likeness between the two was, indeed, striking. The same full hazel eye, the well-shaped forehead and delicate, oval face. But of the two, the baroness showed a more decisive character, and greater firmness of purpose than her son. The gentleness expressed in the portrait appeared to be that of a tranquil, well-balanced character, yet capable-or the lineaments of the picture were faithless-of worthily sustaining a great emergency. It was a subdued feminine heroism, such as that of her namesake, Jeanne d'Arc. Such might have been the face of Judith, before she came down from her seclusion, and put off the garments of her widowhood, to array herself for her great venture of faith. So might have looked St. Cecilia, or St. Catherine, or St. Potamiana, with the rest of the white-robed host of female martyrs in whom a power above their own had triumphed over weakness, nerving them to an endurance and high emprise from which even ruder natures might have quailed.

"Meanwhile," gently interrupted his extemporised host, as if he had said as much as he intended on the subject, either of the portrait or the faith of the person portrayed, "you must really allow me”his hand was on the bell-"to offer you some refreshment. I daresay my fellows are still up, and if not, I will enact butler."

"You know so much of us," answered the priest, with a smile, "and yet, Mr. Eustace, you forget that midnight bars all bit and sup for him who intends to say Mass the following morning."

Eustace let go the bell-rope. He stood, looking at the speaker, as if struck with some thought; then, recovering himself, as though sensible that his demeanour might have seemed wanting in courtesy, moved again to his chair. But he was rather disturbed in mind, and, instead of seating himself, began slowly to pace the room.

“Very true," he said; "excuse my being so forgetful. My knowledge of your system is fragmentary, after all," he added, with a smile Notwithstanding the smile, something was working in his thought. My relations by the father's side," he resumed, "and the tutor to whom I was sent before I went to Cambridge, were all stanch members of the Established Church. There was my uncle, the Bishop of Godmanchester-I remember his rosy gills and cauliflower wig-how he impressed me, as a boy. Well, sir, they all used to make a hearty good breakfast before going to church."

"Possibly," said Morton, rather drily. "They went for a very different purpose from what carries the priest to the altar."

Eustace made no answer. He was rather in the attitude of one who was struck by the other's words, and wished to hear more.

But, just at that moment, a clear, tenor voice, evidently well practised in effective singing, began a sort of jovial recitative, under his window:

“Your wine, sir, 's exceedingly good,

We are very much pleas'd with your cook

Eustace made a gesture of deprecation to the priest, whose conversation suffered this untimely interruption, while the songster in the street proceeded :

"Theodore Hook!" exclaimed Eustace, rushing to the window, with a laugh that was re-echoed from below. He recklessly showered out upon the unseen intruder the contents of a porcelain jar of flowers, water and all, followed by another jar of pot pourri—a mixture of roseleaves and fragrant gums, much in vogue as a drawing-room scent. All the pink and blue notes of invitation followed, with an armful of other trifles that lay littering his table.

Theodore Hook! it was, indeed, that brilliant humourist, then in the hey-day of his social fame and powers, who had thus saluted Eustace, as he strolled home to his lodgings at this unseasonable hour. He joyously stood the brunt of the avalanche of elegant nothings, continuing, from a safer distance, to pour forth appropriate stanzas of wit and good-humoured satire with the marvellous facility of improvisation, which made him the delight of London drawing-rooms, and a favourite with the Regent himself. But when Eustace, determined to get rid of him, bethought him of the skull, seized it with one hand, thrust a taper into it with the other, hastily threw around it a cloak, and exhibited this hideous grinning object suddenly from the window, while he concealed himself behind it, the song and the laugh died down together.

"Ha-af pa-ast two-o-o!" drawled out the Charley, now returning on his beat; and so, with a scare, real or affected, Hook and his gay companion, Mr. Wood, were heard beating a hasty retreat, their heels clattering on the pavement in rapid flight, as the fugitives sounded double-knocks on the knockers of every other house in Clarges-street, till they emerged into Piccadilly, and were heard no more.

Eustace withdrew the death's head from the window before it was noticed by the watchman, who, indeed, like his fraternity, was among the less observant of the human race. The levity of his manner vanished at the same moment:

Morton, who had been an amused spectator of the incident that had broken in upon his talk, lifted from the floor a volume that had fallen during the confusion, and glanced at it, before replacing it on the table.