coaxing you back to Oxford ? Where are they? Let me

see 'em."

"I believe, Mr. Nathaniel, I'm the valued friends alluded to in master's letter; and I flatter myself—"

"You, you blackguard? Be off with you, or I'll throw you down the stairs. Are you going? Shut your mouth, and vanish." And the insulted friend fell below par considerably, even in his own esteem; but his head leaned thoughtfully against the keyhole on the outer side of the door, for he felt he had a right to know whatever might be said to affect his vested interest in Mr. Charles's future movements.

"Now, Charles, you don't mean to tell me that you've been listening to that villain ("Hem!" outside) of yours, with all his claptrap nonsense, fuddling yourself till you haven't a will of your own, and letting this ass bray you out of all your good resolutions? You would have him from Oxford-that was all well enough; but I told you he'd be of no use to you here. I know that kidney of old; and I tell you they won't thrive anywhere but at Oxford; and they know it, too, and they never leave it but for a purpose."

"But he is a genuine fellow, and very fond of me, I know; and that's something."

"Yes, likely enough; I don't doubt it. Why, I'm fond of you myself; and if I'd been brought up in the gyp line, there's no living master I'd rather serve than you. It's natural: it comes spontaneous from the menial heart to love such a master as you. But what's that to you; it's your due e; and who'll tax your bill, I want to know?"

“Well, but Mr. Drake, it isn't the thought of a momentno passing whim, believe me. I've made up my mind on the matter, and, much as I regret—”

"Oh, bother the regrets-we'll suppose all that; and then you can take it for granted into the bargain, that I've made up my mind on the matter; and I flatter myself— but never mind that, just now. I've made up my mind, Mr. Charles, and this is it. Here I am, and here I stay. I have appointments for every quarter of an hour in the day for a week to come; but the mountain won't go to Mohammed—you know the rest. Here I am, and here I mean to stay, till you give

me your word of honour as a gentleman, that you won't budge from London for three months to come; and so, if you've no objections, I'll remove my great coat and my boots, and if you turn sullen, and won't give me anything to eat, I'll send that scoundrel of yours to fetch my dinner in his hat-only he looks too hungry to trust; ("That's a lie !" said the keyhole, vehemently ;) or if you like to turn rational, go wash yourself, and put a clean shirt on (there's nothing like a change of linen for clearing the intellect,) and come along with me; we'll discuss a haunch of venison, and as much wine as you like, send Oxford to the right about, and dance old Mother Boothby (Drake, I beg her pardon), into ecstasies before morning-not to speak of Sarah. Come along, my lad; you're not unloved and deserted, and all that sort of thing. Why, if that cropeared scamp loves you, why shouldn't we? There's Sarah been crying all afternoon with vexation, that her true knight has turned false, and won't come to dinner."

"Ah, Mr. Drake, then you don't know what happened this morning?" And the gallant knight did unwittingly turn traitor by relating in brief the event of the morning call; but it only shook Nathaniel's hairy face as a wind shakes the forest, for he laughed as if he would never get over it, and joyously swore that his darling should never hear the last of it. But the conscience-smitten youth begged so imploringly that he wouldn't allude to it for the world, that Nathaniel half wickedly promised, as he said, "Never fear me, Charles, I love her too well to hurt her. But I see you're getting round; come, there's a man, pluck up heart; put on a clean shirt, and you'll feel as brisk as the little deer whose savoury haunch is at this moment spinning round merrily at my kitchen fire."

There was no resisting such a combination of firmness and good nature, and Charles retired to his dressing-room with the fit of the blues pretty well gone, whence he emerged byand-by, with all the self-possession and dignity of a clean frilled shirt and other most irreproachable and comely garments, and a serious resolve to be jolly for once.

CHAPTER IX.

GENIAL SHOWERS.

DURING the journey to Nathaniel's residence, there was scarcely any conversation; for that gentleman himself was revolving great thoughts on the subject of venison, and when he ceased from that theme, he became perplexed about the means of explaining his appearance as convoy to Mr. Charles, so as not to compromise the youth in the opinion of the ladies. He was a rapid schemer, and his mind was made up in plenty of time to expound the state of the case to his wife and daughter as soon as he entered their presence with his prize.

"I've brought him, you see, dears; poor fellow, he was so beset with 'a pressure of engagements,' that he couldn't have come if I hadn't been good-natured enough to go and help him out of the throng, and set a few little matters to rights. Nothing like system, is there, Charles, for getting through 'pressures'? But system isn't learned in a day. Never mind, I'll soon teach you mine; and so, ladies, as I've probably lost a good many fees by this unremunerating business, I'll have a kiss a-piece for my pains, and two more from Sarah, and then to dinner with what appetite Heaven may send."

Feminine obedience is the bulwark of social and domestic order, as well as the mainspring of masculine happiness; otherwise we should be disposed to deal very leniently with the decided repugnance of Miss Boothby to this business-like settlement of unquestioned claims; as it was, however, she preferred to pass her good word for 3s. 4d., as her half of the fee; and we are by no means surprised that she should have chosen this course, for, most assuredly, had she literally obeyed her hirsute step-father, she would have been uncomfortably red in the face all the evening.

The dinner was different-if anything, even better. The conversation was different, perhaps a little duller and more constrained; but the state of Mr. Charles's mind very speedily recovered the peculiar and very genial tone of the first meeting of these friends. And before the grim hour of ten

which the "first notions" of moral science forbade the methodical lawyer from transgressing-we may venture to say that Mr. Charles was in the enviable mood of a favoured swain who has had rather a longer tiff with his Audrey than was pleasant, and had just made it up; although in his case, both the favouritism and the tiff, as well as the reconciliation, were the creatures of his own imagination.

Our acquaintance with heroines is, as yet, recent and contracted; and on that ground, we have not the hardihood, for this turn, to follow Miss Boothby to her boudoir (we believe that is the correct thing), nor yet to her pillow, bathed, doubtless, with no end of tears, and puffed up (aërated, we might say) with no end of sighs; but considering that one day, not so very long after, she became Mrs. Charles Barton, we have little doubt that the usual melancholy prologoumena were properly gone through. Then again, it is incumbent on the chronicler who seeks the public credit for his narrative, to be scrupulously minute in the description of personal appearance; so much is this minuteness insisted on, that if he should divide the face into five hundred distinct parts, and transfer each part to his page with as much life and expression and beauty as belonged to the entire countenance, the exaggeration would be welcomed with rapture, as so true to nature," one feels as if one knew her," and so forth.

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But as to Sarah, though she sometimes did divide or multiply her little face into somewhere about five hundred parts, by looking into one of those funny, round, manyangled mirrors at which our grandsires wondered, we feel indisposed to repeat the process here. One face was enough in all conscience-especially when it was so beneficent and meek, and so loving and intelligent-a slight and graceful shade for the lamps of love and piety and plain sense within. Then, if we were disposed to chop up that slender figure into five hundred parts, no doubt we should detect many fragments of the line of beauty, and gentle swell, and elegant limbs; but we should despair of putting the pieces together again, so as to reproduce OUR Sarah, as God made her, and as we used to love her. And now we mention the word love, it occurs to us that we cannot better convey our own impressions

of the appearance of this heroine, than by the assertion of a solemn conviction, that no one ever saw her without wishing he might love her; and no one ever dared to love her, without a passionate effort to win her, if he was a man; or an equally passionate leaning to suicide, if he was a simpleton. She might be described (and, indeed, often was so described, even by men of undoubted repute for orthodoxy) as one who had either kept her first estate, or had very early in life turned her back from her fallen condition, and was always getting nearer and nearer to the gates from which her first parents had once been driven forth. In her heart of hearts she had made not so much a shrine as a home for the grand remedial faith once delivered to the saints; and that perennial spring spread over her whole being, physical and spiritual, a culture, a grace, and a loveliness far more entrancing and overpowering, even to the sensualist, than all the voluptuous enticements of more material and sensuous beauty. To sum up this transcendental description, she was extremely neat in her dress and her manners, light complexioned-full of native grace in her general address, overflowing with tenderness, when once love had broken the thin ice of restraint, and, finally, as already intimated, about one-tenth of her mother in bulk. That was OUR Sarah. It would be wrong, no doubt, to date the mutual passion of those young hearts to the second any more than to the first meeting at Nathaniel's dinner table; but it was somewhere between the two, or in the neighbourhood of both evenings, that their course of love took its rise. "They never told their love" in detail, except to each other, and now the interesting secret has gone with Sarah to the grave! and it remains for us to collect, with reverent affection, the traces of its unhindered growth.

One of the most important, as well as one of the earliest traces we have been able to discover, was the alteration in Mr. Charles's temper of mind and habits of life. To the no small astonishment of Mr. Mottram, that gentleman's monotonous leisure was almost unbroken, except by the frequent and self-indulgent diversions to which his nature was given. His respect for his master sensibly increased, till it became almost painful to him when his master unbent him