one of the knot, and all the others were once great friends of yours too; and so, said Blake, with a loud laugh-

"You need not repeat their insolence; as I said before, I can understand its nature-and they shall answer for it to me, by heaven!" "They shall, William !" cried his cousin James, warmly clasping his hand; " and I, for one, am ready to help you to make them do so. But first of all, we must attend to matters quite as urgent. Make love to Lady Fortune over again; she cannot choose but smile on you now, if only in remorse for all her former slights; so into Dublin with you, as fast as you can-the pocket-book safe in your pocket—win back your losses, and

"Pay those gentlemen," interrupted William Hutchinson, in a growl.

"Yes, pay them, the kouts !*-then get your feather-springs ready, and I'm the man to oil them for you."

"True-most necessary-I go: meet me at about twelve o'clock to-night, in town, on Essex Bridge, and we shall speak more about it. I'm off. I will hire a couple of fellows to pull me across the bay in no time good evening, James.-Yes! one cast more, with everything upon it!-happiness, honour, life-everything!-I do but ask one little run of luck this night, and no hermit ever shunned the world as I will shun it—no husband ever loved a wife so truly, so tenderly, as I will love mine—and as for the slur cast upon my name, no living man, I believe, need tell me how to revenge that. Good-by."

He darted out of the ruin.

"You say so!" questioned James Hutchinson, as soon as he was alone, his teeth setting hard, and his eyes scowling in the direction which his cousin had taken; 66 you say so!—and yet, after all, you impudent idiot, there does live a man who will teach you to revenge it."

CHAPTER II.

After having spoken the words last recorded of him, James Hutchinson also left the ruin. Walking through the village, he stopped at the door of a mean public-house on its outskirts, and inquired for a man of the name of Michael Cassin. To his inquiry a person of middle age, in the dress of a kind of country huntsman, came out to him, scraping and bowing very deferentially.

"Follow me, Mike," he said; and the other again servilely putting his hands several times to the peak of his old black velvetine huntingcap, both took their way towards the sea-shore.

Having gained a spot which commanded a view of the bay, Hutchinson peered through the increasing twilight over the gray

waters.

"There he goes, Mike," he resumed, pointing to a dimly-seen little boat with one sail and a jib, which was making towards Dublin, at a short distance from the shore under them.

"To Kildare Street again?" inquired Mike.

"No, my good fellow, not to Kildare Street to-night. He swears he won't figure again at the club-house table, until he wins elsewhere -in a less fashionable little hell-the wherewithal to enable him to

* A term of contempt.

re-appear there like a grandee as usual. Ay, yonder he goes, Mike. Yonder he goes like a madman racing down a nice shelve of smooth grassy land to the edge of a convenient, respectable precipice; ay, and in a few plunges more he will be over it, head and heels."

"And we're to have the laugh ready, while he's tremblin', and ax him why'ud he be fallin' ?" demanded Mike, with a chuckle-perhaps a forced one.

"Yes," replied his patron, whispering fiercely; "yes, and be ready, too, to clap our hands while he cleaves the air from the top to the bottom! You do not know it, Mike-you cannot guess it-you cannot even faintly imagine the causes of my hatred towards that maniac. You know, indeed, as everybody does, that on account of a whim--an unjust, an unnatural, a damnation whim-bred like a maggot in the brains of his old father's father-my father was deprived of the fortune that was his birthright, and cast out, half a beggar, into the world; and that my father's son-myself—has been and is almost a dependant on the bounty of these usurpers: little more than this do you know; and yet even so much were in itself, I think, enough to warrant me in trying to get back my own again.

دو

"Faith an' it's thru fo' you, sir," assented his humble—we might say mean-confidant.

"We were sent to sea together," continued James Hutchinson; "for at that time, when boys, he had an elder brother living, you remember-a —a sickly, whining youngster-but, as heir to my uncle's ill-got estate, the great family favourite, of course; so that they could spare my cousin William to go to school along with me, in the polished and moral academy of the king's sea-service. I believe, too, that about this turn of his life he began to show dispositions and caprices which made it a difficult matter to get good of him at home. At all events, we were midshipmen together on board the same ship. Though a few years younger than I, the whelp was stronger; and with this advantage, and the other nominal superiority of a longer purse, he lorded it over me with a vengeance! Why should I make out a list of all his petty tyrannies? By the round world, the boiling blood tingles in my fingers' ends only to think of them! No; the stings of mere boyhood are not yet forgotten; and-not speaking of any other grounds of detestation-I could destroy him for the very heart-chokings which he then gave me !"

"It was an unasy life, masther James," sympathised Mike Cassin. "To him! the worm!" the speaker went on as if half giving way, for his own self-indulgence, to a pent-up crowd of bitter feelings; and at the same time as if half condescending to make out a case for the approbation of his servile listener, in order to entitle himself to require a service upon it.

"The worm!" he repeated, stamping his foot upon the sward; "and yet, Mike, all that was nothing-nothing in comparison with what I still could tell you. Peter, the wishy-washy brother, took it into his head to die one day, and Mr. Willy was summoned home to take up his place in the family. I came back with him; he would not stir a step, now, without me; for in spite of all his paltry outrages upon me, I contrived, for my own long-headed purposes, to seem his

humble friend-his loving, faithful, dependent, poor cousin. So, arm in arm, we arrived at home; and then, sir, then he baulked me in the most human feeling that ever crept through my lonesome heart; he baulked me in-no matter-no matter what; but let him take the issue! let him feel the strength of the black nature he has made!"

"I think I can guess at what you mean, sir," remarked Cassin; "there was some talk of a lady between you both, at that same time."

Hutchinson half turned away, and for a few moments seemed to speak as if more directly communing with himself.

"Yes; I believed her all that was good, as well as all that was beautiful, and her young image fell upon my heart's darkened waters, and for a time made them too lonely; but 'tis over-'tis over; I hate her! ay, hate her as deeply and as keenly as I do him by whose death alone I can expect to live! You got my letter in the country, Mike Cassin ?”

"Shure, that's the rason why I'm in Howth to-night, your honour."

"Cassin, I'm obliged to remind you-my necessities make me do so that you're my debtor for a good turn."

The huntsman readily admitted this fact, and some conversation ensued between them, in which were reiterated the circumstances to which Hutchinson made allusion. It appeared that Cassin had been arrested a few months before upon heavy suspicion of being a United Irishman, or rebel; that at this time he was in the service of William Hutchinson's father; that grounding his application upon an intimacy -of which the nature was best known to themselves-previously existing between him and his present companion, he had made interest with Mr. James to get him saved from the gallows; and that his young patron accordingly exerted himself with effect, by pleading Cassin's cause to his uncle, Sir Henry Hutchinson, and through him to Major Blake, Sir Henry's particular friend, and during the season of martial law the arbiter of life and death in all cases of disaffection within his district.

"Listen to me, then," resumed Mr. James; "this rascal-cousin of mine came home to be reinstated in his fine family house yonder; and upon the day that he recrossed its threshold, he had spent about seven summers and winters roving upon the sea; about seven years, mark you—a tolerably fair apprenticeship, and fairly entitling him to lay claim to all the follies, and to a few of the vices, which may be learned by a weak head and a weak heart like his, during a floating life. But the world was as new to him as if he had never been on shore; as new as the sea had been when he left the land to serve on it; school-boys of ten years, brought up in the world, knew more about it than he did. And in all this ignorance, its swaggering pleasures caught his eye, and piqued his vanity, and, as he says, his spirit; and he would ape them, and share them, and, in fact, cut a greater dash, here at home, than any man of his circumstances or pretensions."

"We all had an eye on him then, sir," assented Mike Cassin, "and took notice of everything you tell of."

"Listen to me, I say. The allowances made to him by his father, although most liberal, soon melted away; he married-curses! he married-and his wife's fortune followed them; he came to me and complained of his luck; I recommended him-for still I was his dearest friend and his bosom counsellor to apply to his father for additional funds—for means proper, I said, to his rank in society; I knew well he would be refused, and refused he was; and then I lifted up my voice and cried shame on such a father; and I insisted that, had his brother Peter lived, his father would have treated him differently

"And would he, Masther James ?"

"The devil knows, not I. Sir, it is necessary I should tell you that, for my life long-at sea, ay, and before we went to sea-and ever since, and now-it has been and it is, by every means fair and foul, my virtuous endeavour to make this excellent son hate-ay, hate his excellent father."

"And that's quare enough, your honour; might a body make bould to ax-why?"

"Another time I may tell you. You now have my consent to think my reason a good one.'

"Do you find him an apt scollard, sir ?"

"Pretty fairish-pretty fairish. The drivellers of this old world would call his nature generous, perhaps; and, therefore, I have found him a little difficult; but-praises, honour, and glory to the sea and to the devil!-those ornamental virtues of his hang as loosely and as idly about him as the holiday streamers of our ship in a calm; and now let us see how the hurricane he is scudding into will behave towards them."

"Yes, sir. It's ratlin' the ould bones he does be, ever and ever, we hear."

"But all noise and no work,' Mike. Besides his fashionable and honourable pluckers, I have had a friend or two of my own at his elbow. He could not have won. Even had he known his game well, he could not; though, to my own knowledge, he is really as unfit as a little child to hold the box in his hand."

"He owes a power o' money to Major Blake's son, we hear, plase your honour?"

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Ay, and is a loser to a dozen others to say nothing of debts to tradespeople beyond all redemption, Mike, my boy."

"How will he ever be able to stand up against it, sir? and all his great cronies lookin' him in the face for their money ?"

"Yes; all his great cronies, as you say, Mike, whose smiles have now grown so sweet to him that I swear by the immortal Cæsar !if old Beelzebub would only go to the trouble, he might have his precious soul in a few hours' time for a little sack of guineas."

"An' it isn't to the Kildare Street Club he's gone now, you tell me, masther James ?"

"No; but to a table so properly filled, for my honest purposes, that he is as about as sure to lose at it, in a few hands, the last help

his good wife can give him, as the sun is sure to get up to-morrow morning."

"An' what in the world will he do, then, sir ?”

"Still mark me. He shall dive deeper and deeper-though not at the dice-table-after the fairy gold he dreams and raves about. More than once I have hinted to him-that is, half hinted-a dashing, manly way to make good all his ill luck, and be revenged on fortune;-but about that, as well as for other things, you must wait the coming of the time I spoke of. Now answer me a question or two. You have made sure, you say, that Major Blake has been delayed in Dublin, about the business he went in upon to-day ?"

Cassin assented.

"And that he will return to his quarters, here, late to-night, or rather early to-morrow morning?

The man assured Mr. James that his information on this point was also correct.

"Well; and he will travel in a postchaise as usual," continued James Hutchinson, as if arranging points in his own mind; "and without more than one armed companion at his side, as he always does; for, unsettled as the times are, he is too brave for fear, or else too prudent to make a show that might tempt suspicion, and put him in for being robbed in reality. And you have been among some of your old friends, Mike, since you came up from the country, haven't you ?"

"Just to ax 'em how their wives and childer wor, sir," answered Mike.

-I

“And you have told five or six of the best boys' of the lot, I believe, to be on the road between this and town to-night? Yes; good again that will all do, if we should want them; let us seemust new ride into Dublin myself; here's a guinea to pay for your bed at the Red Cow-up there-though I don't think you may make much use of it till morning; for-attend to me now, sir-you must follow me to the town as fast as you can, so as to be upon Essex Bridge about twelve o'clock; and there you are to walk up and down -at the right hand side of the bridge, mind-till further orders; and mind, again-keep your face hid from every one that has no particular business with it; and now, God speed you for a while." They parted.

It is quite true, we do fear, that some men, when their object is revenge, or even self-aggrandisement, absolutely can go on towards it without remorse-nay, with pleasurable excitement, step by step, through a gradation of crime. What else but this horrible belief explains to us the acts of a few who call themselves our fellow-creatures? Now, James Hutchinson, in the prosecution of his hideous plans against his cousin William, was instigated by a union of the two motives, either of which we have supposed sufficient to make a man— a man-devil rather-enjoy his own step-by-step villany; and, according to the theory, we therefore are not surprised to observe him, at a few minutes before twelve o'clock this night, occupy his place of rendezvous on Essex Bridge, with a smooth, self-applauding brow, a halfsmiling lip, and an easy, assured air. He stood at the termination of