impulse was to dash the hated object to the floor. The next moment caused hesitation; and reason came to his aid. He turned, sorrowing from the door, before the knock of the dresser could be answered, and supporting himself by the ballusters, he slowly gained his room, and sunk in a chair, hopeless and tortured by images, to him, of the most distressing nature. We will not attempt to depict the misery of this ill-fated young man, who felt himself the doomed victim of that vice in another, which of all vices, he most abhorred.

He had previously engaged himself for the next day to a dining party at Cato's, and had agreed to be the companion of Cooke to the spot appointed. He willingly fulfilled the engagement-it took him from home. In the next chapter we will accompany them.

CHAPTER XIII.

A walk out of town.

"I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching."-Shakspeare.

66 Twenty more, kill them too."-Ben. Johnson.

"These lies are like the father that begets them.'

"I'll after him, and see the event of this."

"Wit, and't be thy will, put me into good fooling."

"I knew ye, as well as he that made ye."

"Sack, two gallons, 5s. 8d.-Bread, a halfpenny."-Shakspeare.

Thus have I triumph'd over death and fate!

And to his lips he rais'd the fatal bowl.

*

The dreadful liquor works the will of fate."-Southey.

SPIFFARD found the veteran waiting for him, in full spirits, and seemingly none the worse, at least to a casual observer, for the excesses of yesterday. The colour of his cheeks was

a little heightened, but his skin, otherwise gave no indication of intemperance. There was, however, a something in the expression of his eye, that rivetted Spiffard's attention. He had noted it before, and it brought to him recollections of his childhood, but not of its joys. To-day, there was a brilliancy, a sparkling lustre in the dark grey iris, (almost converted to black by the expansion of the pupil,) that arrested the eye of Spiffard, and although it brought the sharpest pain to his breast, by the mournful images recalled of what he had seen at home, without understanding then the meaning of the appearance; yet, even this pain and these reminiscences, attached him the more to his aged companion by a species of fascination.

Cooke had slept a death-like sleep after the excess of the preceding day, and the exertions of the evening at the theatre; and although he awoke with feverish symptoms, they were only such as seemed, to him, to require drink, and that of no feeble character. He had taken a bottle of brown-stout with his breakfast, or rather for his breakfast, it being in the toper's creed both meat and drink, and bread was as little in demand with him as with Falstaff.

Remembering his engagement to dine at Cato's, he had been in good time dressed for the occasion, and then taking a glass of stiff brandy and water, he awaited his young companion with all the gaiety of renewed youth. Thus is the path to ruin strewed with seeming flowers.

It may be observed, of the unhappy subjects to habitual ebriety, that they have intervals free from delusion, during which rational conduct is continued, for a longer or shorter period, according to the circumstances in which the person is placed. When the desire for the unnatural excitement occurs, and is yielded to, it grows by what it feeds on, for a time, and the victim of depraved appetite, glorying in his shame, goes on from one stage of disease to another, each one rising above the preceding, in symptoms of madness;-madness, hailed as health, until nature fails, and the degraded being sinks, crying for aid to the physician or the friend, to save him from the yawning grave he suddenly sees open before him; or the racking pains which awakened reason, tells him are the fruits of misconduct, and the precursors of death. Then comes that pitiful repentance which knows not ainendment, and that forced abstinence, in which is no merit. Cooke was at this time approaching the pitiable state above described, and had attained its immediate fore-runner, that stage of the self-inflicted dis

ease, when the physical powers are screwed up to an unnatural height, and the victim, notwithstanding repeated experience, seems to feel assured that the poisoned cup contains the draught that secures bliss and immortality-the "amreeta cup" of eternal happiness.

66

Ha, my boy! Here I am! ready and waiting for you." "Have you sent for a coach, sir?"

"A coach! No. We will walk. I delight in walking. Many a time have I left my lodgings, and rambled down to Wapping, enjoying the scenes of that lower world, and then along the Thames to Greenwich, and back again on that side of the river."

"But do you know, sir, that it is four or five miles to Cato's ?" "That's nothing! Ha! Some of my pleasantest days have been passed in walking from morning till night in the environs of London, when I could escape from the accursed enchanted castle of Covent Garden and its keeper, the giant 'Black Jack.' O, how I have enjoyed myself in a solitary walk up Oxford street to Tyburn, through the Parks, or to Richmond Hill! At other times, it has been my whim to ramble among the sailors and watermen down the river, either holding myself aloof, and scanning the creatures I passed or mingling with the motley herd, and enjoying my obscurity. We great men," he added, "relish an incognito."

Thus commenced the walk to Cato's. The reader will hold in mind, that at the time of which we write, this great city of New York had no claim to that title from its size. None of those magnificent streets, called avenues, existed. And excepting the great commercial highways of river and ocean, there were but two outlets from the town. One of these, and the most frequeuted, our pedestrians followed, passing up Broadway, then turning into the Bowery, and taking the old Boston road where it diverges to the right at what was then the United States arsenal, now the House of Refuge, a blessed institution! where a system of education and reform, for children of both sexes, is in successful operation, by which hundreds are restored to society as useful members, who had been abandoned by ill fortune or bad parents, to vice and beggary. A more touching exhibition than three hundred pretty and well-dressed children rescued from destruction, and joining in hymns of thankfulness to their Creator, seldom falls to the lot of any

one to see.

Without a cessation of interesting conversation or lively chat, kept up by artificial excitement on one part, and on the

other by the animation which exercise in the open air imparts to youth and health, they were passing Kip's Bay, when Spiffard called the attention of his companion to the scenery on their right, to Long Island and the waters dividing it from Manhattan, alluding to the history connected with the spot.

"Kip's Bay," said the veteran. "Ah! here we landed after crossing from yonder shore. Ha! how the Yankee-doodles scampered when they saw our boats approach. They remembered the day before, when they attempted to make a stand upon the heights of Brooklyn. If Sir William Howe had followed up, as he ought, where would have been your republic now? I! I myself, was in full pursuit of Washington when a retreat was sounded. I should have had him, and then the war would have been at an end! I should have been gazetted, Lieutenant Cooke, of the 55th, has put an end to the American rebellion, by seizing with his own hand, that arch rebel, George Washington.' George-named by his loyal father, after the royal house of Hanover. All the jacobites of England called their sons Charles, and Charles Edward: the adherents to the Hanoverian dynasty, named theirs George, and George Frederick. My father, a captain of dragoons in the service of his sacred majesty, George the Second, bestowed on me, unworthy, the glorious appellation of George Frederick; and I have served my royal master, George the Third, faithfully. Accursed be General Sir William Howe, that I did not send the traitor Washington to London, to be dealt with according to his deserts, and the will of my gracious sovereign."

Thus did the excited romancer pour forth a stream of words at the suggestion of his heated imagination.

The reader who is acquainted with the ground in the vicinity of New-York, and the shores of that water which divides the lesser island and its city, from the greater and more fertile, stretching south to the ocean, and north to the land of steady habits, will perhaps recollect that at the period of which we speak, most of the houses standing between the old road and the east river were not in existence. Still, as the road runs through a hollow, the water was scarcely discernible from it. Let us leave the road, and ascend those higher grounds," said Cooke. Spiffard willingly assented, as he wished the internal exciting causes, which existed with his companion, diminished by time and exercise, before they should join the company with whom they had engaged to dine.

They accordingly turned from the road toward the river; passing into a meadow through a gap in the fence. After

crossing several enclosures, as they approached the water, they gained an eminence crowned by a flat rock. From this point they looked down upon the bay or cove, which takes its name from the former owner of the land surrounding it—" Kip's Bay."

A more lovely landscape of the half marine kind is seldom seen, than that our pedestrians might now enjoy. On their left, the eye passing over a portion of a pleasure-ground, (whose foliage glittered in all the colours of the rainbow,) fell on the calm water of the river, scarcely moved but by the eddies of a tide-propelled current, and divided in the midst, between the two larger islands, by the point of the islet called Blackwell's, and the rocks in which it terminates; black dots on the surface of the stream, marking the division of the main channel to the pilots, whose white sails were seen on either side. To the right might be seen a portion of the city, (not as now encroaching on the great bay; not as now stretching eastward beyond the Navy Yard, with its towering masts and close-housed line of battle-ships,) and the opposite fast growing town (now city) of Brooklyn. Immediately opposite to the wayfarers, two reaches or bends of a small serpentine river were visible, dividing the meadows and groves of Long Island, and flowing to the seawater of the bay. The swelling hills with their gardens, orchards, and cultivated fields, terminated the view.

"Aha!" cried Cooke, when he had mounted the rock; "Aha!" I see the whole of it now. Yes, sirr, down there to the right, beyond the rocky and precipitous shore, is the bottom of the bay where we landed. The wharf which you see was not there then. But that rock, further south, afforded us a fine shelter, if we had wanted shelter; but your Yankees did not even wait until we were with within gun-shot distance and see that causey-that, too, is recent; we had to charge through that marsh, knee-deep in mud and water."

:

Thus, combining images which were before his eyes, with historical recollections from his reading, and the creations of his excited imagination, the old man indulged his romancing vein, to the astonishment of his almost bewildered companion; who, finding that he paused, remarked, "It has always been granted that General Washington displayed great skill in bringing off his undisciplined, discouraged, and defeated troops from the opposite shore, and with so little loss landing them on this island in the presence of a superior enemy-an enemy boasting the proud title of the mistress of the sea."

"Yes, sirr! he showed as great alacrity in running as Fat