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"Mr Brand means that you need not wait," said Vance, approaching Tony. "All you have to do is to leave your town address here, in the outer office, and come up once or twice a-day.

"And as to this examination," said Tony, stoutly, "it's better I should say once for all--"

"It's better you should just say nothing at all," said the other, goodhumouredly, as he slipped his arm inside of Tony's and led him away. "You see," whispered he, my friend Mr Brand is hasty."

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"Warm enough he seems.' "When you know him better"

"I don't want to know him better!" burst in Tony. "I got into a scrape already with just such another he was collector for the port of Derry, and I threw him out of the window, and all the blame was laid upon me!"

"Well, that certainly was hard," said Vance, with a droll twinkle of his eye-"I call that very hard.'

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So do I, after the language he used to me, saying all the while, I'm no duellist-I'm not for a sawpit, with coffee and pistols for two, and all that vulgar slang about murder and suchlike."

"And was he much hurt?" "No; not much. It was only his collar-bone and one rib, I think -I forget now-for I had to go over to Skye, and stay there a good part of the summer."

"Mr Blount, take down this gentleman's address, and show him where he is to wait; and don'there he lowered his voice, so that the remainder of his speech was inaudible to Tony.

"Not if I can help it, sir," replied Blount; "but if you knew how hard it is!"

There was something almost piteous in the youth's face as he spoke; and indeed Vance seemed moved to

a certain degree of compassion as he said, "Well, well, do your best

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do your best-none can do more." "It's two o'clock. I'll go out and have a cigar with you, if you don't mind," said Blount to Tony. "We're quite close to the Park here ; and a little fresh air will do me good."

"Come along," said Tony, who, out of compassion, had already a sort of half-liking for the much-suffering young fellow.

"I wish Skeffy was here," said Tony, as they went down-stairs. "Do you know Skeff Damer, then?"

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"Know him! I believe he's about the fellow I like best in the world." So do I," cried the other, warmly; "he hasn't his equal livinghe's the best-hearted and he's the cleverest fellow I ever met."

And now they both set to, as really only young friends ever do, to extol a loved one with that heartiness that neither knows limit nor measure. What good fellow he was - how much of this, without the least of that-how unspoiled too in the midst of the flattery he met with! "If you just saw him as I did a few days back," said Tony, calling up in memory Skeffy's hearty enjoyment of their humble cottagelife.

"If you but knew how they think of him in the Office," said Blount, whose voice actually trembled as he touched on the holy of holies.

"Confound the Office!" cried Tony. "Yes; don't look shocked. I hate that dreary old house, and I detest the grim old fellows inside of it."

They're severe, certainly," muttered the other, in a deprecatory

tone.

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"What could we do? would you do?" asked Blount. "I'd go straight at the first man that insulted me, and say, Retract that, or I'll pitch you over the banisters."

"That's all very fine with you fellows who have great connections and powerful relatives ready to stand by you and pull you out of any scrape, and then, if the worst comes, have means enough to live without work. That will do very well for you and Skeffy. Skeffy will have six thousand a-year one of these days. No one can keep him out of Digby Damer's estate; and you, for aught I know, may have more.'

"I haven't sixpence, nor the expectation of sixpence, in the world. If I am plucked at this examination I may go and enlist, or turn navvy, or go and sweep away the dead leaves like that fellow yonder." "Then take my advice, and don't go up."

"Go up, where?"

"Don't go up to be examined; just wait here in town; don't show too often at the Office, but come up of a morning about twelve, I'm generally down here by that time. There will be a great press for messengers soon, for they have made a regulation about one going only so far, and another taking up his bag and handing it on to a third; and the consequence is, there are three now stuck fast at Marseilles, and two at Belgrade, and all the Constantinople despatches have gone round by the Cape. Of course, as I sa they'll have to alter this, and then we shall suddenly want every fellow we can lay hands on; so all you have to do is just to be ready, and I'll take care to start you at the first chance."

say,

"You're a good fellow," cried Tony, grasping his hand; "if you only knew what a bad swimmer it was you picked out of the water."

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Oh, I can do that much at least," said he, modestly, "though I'm not a clever fellow like Skeffy; but I must go back, or I shall catch it.' Look in the day after to-morrow."

"And let us dine together; that is, you will dine with me," said Tony. The other acceded freely, and they parted.

That magnetism by which young fellows are drawn instantaneously towards each other, and feel something that if not friendship is closely akin to it, never repeats itself in after life. We grow more cautious about our contracts as we grow older. I wonder do we make better bargains?

If Tony was then somewhat discouraged by his reception at the Office, he had the pleasure of thinking he was compensated in that new-found friend who was so fond of Skeffy, and who could talk away as enthusiastically about him as himself.

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"Now for M'Gruder and Canon Row, wherever that may be," said he, as he sauntered along; "I'll certainly go and see him, if only to shake hands with a fellow that showed such good blood.'" There was no one quality which Tony could prize higher than this. The man who could take a thrashing in good part, and forgive him who gave it, must be a fine fellow, he thought; and I'm not disposed to say he was

wrong.

The address was 27 Canon Street, City; and it was a long way off, and the day somewhat spent when he reached it.

"Mr M'Gruder?" asked Tony, of a blear-eyed man, at a small faded desk in a narrow office.

"Inside!" said he, with a jerk of his thumb; and Tony pushed his way into a small room, so crammed with reams of paper that there was barely space to squeeze a passage to a little writing-table next the window.

"Well, sir, your pleasure," said M'Gruder, as Tony came forward. "You forget me, I see; my name is Butler."

"Eh! what! I ought not to for

get you," said he, rising, and grasping the other's hand warmly; "how are you? when did you come up to town? You see the eye is all right; it was a bit swollen for more than a fortnight, though. Hech sirs! but you have hard knuckles of your own."

It was not easy to apologise for the rough treatment he had inflicted, and Tony blundered and stammered in his attempts to do so; but M'Gruder laughed it all off with perfect good-humour, and said, " My wife will forgive you too, one of these days, but not just yet; and so we'll go and have a bit o' dinner our two selves down the river. Are you free to-day?"

Tony was quite free and ready to go anywhere; and so away they went, at first by river steamer and then by a cab, and then across some low-lying fields to a small solitary house close to the Thames-" Shads, chops, and fried-fish house," over the door, and a pleasant odour of each around the premises.

"Ain't we snug here? no tracking a man this far," said M'Gruder, as he squeezed into a bench behind a fixed table in a very small room. "I never heard of the woman that ran her husband to earth down here."

That this same sense of security had a certain value in M'Gruder's estimation was evident, for he more than once recurred to the sentiment as they sat at dinner.

The tavern was a rare place for "hollands," as M'Gruder said; and they sat over a peculiar brew for which the house was famed, but of which Tony's next day's experiences do not encourage me to give the receipt to my readers. The cigars, too, albeit innocent of duty, might have been better; but all these, like some other pleasures we know of, only were associated with sorrow in the future. Indeed, in the cordial freedom that bound them they thought very little of either. They had grown to be very confidential; and M'Gruder, after inquiring what Tony proposed to himself by way of a livelihood, gave him a brief sketch

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"In rags!" cried Tony, looking at the stout sleek broadcloth beside him.

"I mean," said the other, "I'm in the rag trade, and we supply the paper-mills; and that's why my brother Sam lives away in Italy. Italy is a rare place for rags—I take it they must have no other wear, for the supply is inexhaustible-and so Sam lives in a seaport they call Leghorn; and the reason I speak of it to you is, that if this messenger trade breaks down under you, or that ye'd not like it, there's Sam there would be ready and willing to lend you a hand; he'd like a fellow o' your stamp, that would go down amongst the wild places on the coast, and care little about the wild people that live in them. Mayhap this would be beneath you, though?" said he, after a moment's pause.

"I'm above nothing at this moment except being dependent; I don't want to burden my mother."

"Dolly told us about your fine relations, and the high and mighty folk ye belong to."

"Ay, but they don't belong to me-there's the difference," said Tony, laughing; then added, in a more thoughtful tone, "I never suspected that Dolly spoke of me.

"That she did, and very often too. Indeed I may say that she talked of very little else. It was Tony this and Tony that; and Tony went here and Tony went there; till one day Sam could bear it no longer-for you see Sam was mad in love with her, and said over and over again that he never met her equal. Sam says to me, 'Bob,' says he, 'I can't bear it any more.'

What is it,' says I,' that you can't bear?'-for I thought it was something about the drawback duty on mixed rags he was meaning. But no, sirs; it was that he was wild wi' jealousy, and couldn't bear her

to be a-talkin' about you. 'I think,' says he, if I could meet that same Tony, I'd crack his neck for him.'" That was civil, certainly!" said Tony, dryly.

"And as I can't do that, I'll just go and ask her what she means by it all, and if Tony's her sweetheart!'"

"He did not do that!" cried Tony, half angrily.

"Yes, but he did, though; and what for no? You wouldn't have a man lose his time pricing a bale of goods when another had bought them? If she was in treaty with you, Mr Butler, where was the use of Sam spending the day trying to catch a word wi' her? So, to settle the matter at once, he overtook her one morning going to early meeting with the children, and he had it out."

"Well, well?" asked Tony, eagerly.

"Well, she told him there never was anything like love between herself and you; that you were aye like brother and sister; that you knew each other from the time you could speak; that of all the wide world she did not know any one so well as you; and then she began to cry, and cried so bitterly that she had to turn back home again, and go to her room as if she was taken ill; and that's the way Mrs M'Gruder came to know what Sam was intending. She never suspected it before; but, hech sirs! if she didn't open a broadside on every one of us! And the upshot was, Dolly was packed off home to her father; Sam went back to Leghorn; and there's Sally and Maggie going back in everything ever they learnedfor it ain't every day you pick up a lass like that for eighteen pound a-year and her washing.'

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"But did he ask her to marry him?" cried Tony.

"He did. He wrote a letter-a very good and sensible letter, tooto her father. He told him that he was only a junior, with a small share, but that he had saved enough to furnish a house, and that he hoped, with industry and care and

thrifty ways, he would be able to maintain a wife decently and well; and he referred to Doctor Forbes of Auchterlonie for a character of him; and I backed it myself, saying, in the name of the house, it was true and correct."

"What answer came to this?"

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A letter from the minister, saying that the lassie was poorly, and in so delicate a state of health, it would be better not to agitate her by any mention of this kind for the present; meanwhile he would take up his information from Dr Forbes, whom he knew well; and if the reply satisfied him he'd write again to us in the course of a week or two; and Sam's just waiting patiently for his answer, and doing his best, in the meanwhile, to prepare, in case it's a favourable one."

Tony fell into a reverie. That story of a man in love with one it might never be his destiny to win, had its own deep significance for him. Was there any grief, was there any misery, to compare with it? And although Sam M'Gruder, the junior partner in the rag trade, was not a very romantic sort of character, yet did he feel an intense sympathy for him. They were both sufferers from the same malady— albeit Sam's attack was from a very mild form of the complaint.

"You must give me a letter to your brother," said he at length. "Some day or other I'm sure to be in Italy, and I'd like to know him."

"Ay, and he'd like to know you, now that he ain't jealous of you. The last thing he said to me at parting was, 'If ever I meet that Tony Butler I'll give him the best bottle of wine in my cellar.'"

"When you write to him next, say that I'm just as eager to take him by the hand, mind that. The man that's like to be a good husband to Dolly Stewart is sure to be a brother to me."

And they went back to town, talking little by the way, for each was thoughtful-M'Gruder thinking much over all they had been saying, Tony full of the future, yet not able to exclude the past.

THE NAPOLEONIC IDEA IN MEXICO.

NAPOLEON the Third is a monarch of rare genius as well as of great power; and it is a pleasure to review the policy of such a man in a sphere which is free from the influences of international rivalry. The French in Mexico is a different question from the French on the Rhine. As Englishmen, we cannot regard without a feeling of mistrust and dislike the policy of Napoleon in Europe; but happily we can do so when the scene of his far-reaching projects is the old empire of Montezuma. We do not demand of any monarch that he shall consult the good of the world irrespective of the interests of his own country; but unquestionably the greatest monarch, the one who will longest live in the memory of men, is he who shall achieve the greatest triumphs for mankind at large. In exile and in prison, Louis Napoleon had ample time to meditate on the high mission to which, by a strong and strange presentiment, he felt himself called. He reviewed, as a political philosopher, the requirements of the age; and thus when he came to the throne, he brought with him many high designs already formed, which he was resolved to accomplish so far as the opportunities of his career should permit. One of the earliest-formed of his great schemes was the construction of a ship canal which should cross the Isthmus of Darien, and form a highway of commerce between the oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific. Such a work is less needed now that the age of railways has succeeded to the age of canals; nevertheless it will probably be accomplished in the future. As Emperor, Louis Napoleon has taken no measures to carry out this project, his other schemes having hitherto absorbed his attention and fully taxed his powers. But he has energetically supported the sister-project of the

Suez Canal, designed to connect the eastern and western seas; and however doubtful may be the success of the scheme at present, we doubt not it will be realised in the end. The project of tunnelling the Alps likewise owes its initiative to Napoleon III., and will connect his name with a greater work than the road of the Simplon, which was one of the glories of his uncle's reign. With a boldness which pays little regard to what ordinary men call impossibilities, he has also proposed to unite England and France by carrying a submarine railway under the British Channel,—a project which we have no desire to see accomplished until a new epoch has dawned upon Europe, and the relations between the two countries have been established upon a more reliable basis of friendship. Lastly, among those projects of material as well as of political interest, we come to the intervention in Mexico, undertaken professedly, though not primarily, with a view to regenerate that fine country, to rescue it from impending ruin, to restore it to a place among the nations, and launch it upon a new and independent career.

Of all the projects of Napoleon III., this is the one which is most to be applauded for the good which it will accomplish for the world at large. Nevertheless-and this is a compliment to his sagacity, rather than a detraction from the merits of the project-the motive which inspired it was connected with the interests of France, and still more with those of his own dynasty. The Emperor was desirous to find some enterprise which should employ his army, and engage the attention of his restless and gloryloving subjects, until the affairs of Europe should open to him a favourable opportunity for completing his grand scheme of "rectifying" the frontiers of France. And in this

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