now, and the sun was shining upon the river, and the flags in the Temple were hot under Mr. Gilbert's feet. He was very warm himself, and almost worn out, when he found at last the name he was looking for, painted very high up, in white letters, upon a black door-post,-" 4th Floor: Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund Smith." It was in the most obscure corner of the dingiest court in the Temple that George Gilbert found this name. He climbed a very dirty staircase, thumping the end of his portmanteau upon every stair as he went up, until he came to a landing, midway between the third and fourth stories; here he was obliged to stop for sheer want of breath, for he had been lugging the portmanteau about with him throughout his wanderings in the Temple, and a good many people had been startled by the aspect of a well-dressed young man carrying his own luggage, and staring at the names of the different rows of houses, the courts, and quadrangles in the grave sanctuary. George Gilbert stopped to take breath; and he had scarcely done so, when he was terrified by the apparition of a very dirty boy, who slid suddenly down the baluster between the floor above and the landing, and alighted face to face with the young surgeon. The boy's face was very black, and he was evidently a child of tender years, something between eleven and twelve, perhaps; but he was in no wise discomfited by the appearance of Mr. Gilbert; he ran up-stairs again, and placed himself astride upon the slippery baluster with a view to another descent, when a door above was suddenly opened, and a voice said, "You know where Mr. Manders, the artist, lives?" "Yes, sir;-Waterloo Road, sir, Montague Terrace, No. 2." "Then run round to him, and tell him the subject for the next illustration in the Smuggler's Bride. A man with his knee upon the chest of another man, and a knife in his hand. You can remember that ?" "Yes, sir." "And bring me a proof of chapter fifty-seven." "Yes, sir." The door was shut, and the boy ran down-stairs, past George Gilbert, as fast as he could go. But the door above was opened again, and the same voice called aloud, "Tell Mr. Manders the man with the knife in his hand must have on top-boots." "All right, sir," the boy called from the bottom of the staircase. George Gilbert went up, and knocked at the door above. It was a black door, and the names of Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund Smith were painted upon it in white letters as upon the door-post below. A pale-faced young man, with a smudge of ink upon the end of his nose, and very dirty wristbands, opened the door. "Sam!" "George!" cried the two young men simultaneously, and then began to shake hands, with effusion, as the French playwrights say. "My dear old George!" "My dear old Sam! But you call yourself Sigismund, now?” "Yes; Sigismund Smith. It sounds well; doesn't it? If a man's evil destiny makes him a Smith, the least he can do is to take it out in his Christian name. No Smith with a grain of spirit would ever consent to be a Samuel. But come in, dear old boy, and put your portmanteau down; knock those papers off that chair-there, by the window. Don't be frightened of making 'em in a muddle; they can't be in a worse muddle than they are now. If you don't mind just amusing yourself with the Times for half an hour or so, while I finish this chapter of the Smuggler's Bride, I shall be able to strike work, and do whatever you like; but the printer's boy is coming back in half an hour for the end of the chapter." "I won't speak a word," George said respectfully. The young man with the smudgy nose was an author, and George Gilbert had an awful sense of the solemnity of his friend's vocation. "Write away, my dear Sam; I won't interrupt you." He drew his chair close to the open window, and looked down into the court below, where the paint was slowly blistering in the July sun. CHAPTER II. A SENSATION AUTHOR. MR. SIGISMUND SMITH was a sensation author. That bitter term of reproach, sensation," had not been invented for the terror of romancers in the fifty-second year of this present century; but the thing existed nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote sensation novels as unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose. Sigismund Smith was the author of about half a dozen highly-spiced fictions, which enjoyed an immense popularity amongst the classes who like their literature as they like their tobacco-very strong. Sigismund had never in his life presented himself before the public in a complete form; he appeared in weekly numbers at a penny, and was always so appearing; and except on one occasion when he found himself, very greasy and dog's-eared at the edges, and not exactly pleasant to the sense of smell,-on the shelf of a humble librarian and newsvendor, who dealt in tobacco and sweetstuff as well as literature, Sigismund had never known what it was to be bound. He was well paid for his work, and he was contented. He had his ambition, which was to write a great novel; and the archetype of this magnum opus was the dream which he carried about with him wherever he went, and fondly nursed by night and day. In the mean time he wrote for his public, which was a public that bought its literature in the same manner as its pudding-in penny slices. There was very little to look at in the court below the window, so George Gilbert fell to watching his friend, whose rapid pen scratched along the paper in a breathless way, which indicated a dashing and Dumas-like style of literature, rather than the polished composition of a Johnson or an Addison. Sigismund only drew breath once, and then he paused to make frantic gashes at his shirt-collar with an inky bone paper-knife that lay upon the table. "I'm only trying whether a man would cut his throat from right to left, or left to right," Mr. Smith said, in answer to his friend's look of terror; "it's as well to be true to nature; or as true as one can be, for a pound a page ;-double-column pages, and eighty-one lines in a column. A man would cut his throat from left to right: he couldn't do it the other way, without making perfect slices of himself." "There's a suicide, then, in your story?" George said, with a look of awe. "A suicide!" exclaimed Sigismund Smith; "a suicide in the Smuggler's Bride! why, it teems with suicides. There's the Duke of Port St. Martin's, who walls himself up alive in his own cellar; and there's Leonie de Pasdebasque, the ballet-dancer, who throws herself out of Count Cæsar Maraschetti's private balloon; and there's Lilia, the dumb girl,-the penny public like dumb girls,-who sets fire to herself to escape from the-in fact, there's lots of them," said Mr. Smith, dipping his pen in his ink, and hurrying wildly along the paper. The boy came back before the last page was finished, and Mr. Smith detained him for five or ten minutes, at the end of which time he rolled up the manuscript, still damp, and dismissed the printer's emissary. "Now, George," he said, "I can talk to you." Sigismund was the son of a Wareham attorney, and the two young men had been schoolfellows at the Classical and Commercial Academy in the Wareham Road. They had been schoolfellows, and were very sincerely attached to each other. Sigismund was supposed to be reading for the Bar; and for the first twelve months of his sojourn in the Temple the young man had worked honestly and conscientiously; but finding that his legal studies resulted in nothing but mental perplexity and confusion, Sigismund grew weary of waiting for the briefs that never came, and beguiled his leisure by the pursuit of literature. He found literature a great deal more profitable and a great deal easier than the law; and he abandoned himself entirely to the composition of such works as are to be seen, garnished with striking illustrations, in the windows of humble newsvendors in the smaller and dingier thoroughfares of every large town. Sigismund gave himself wholly to this fascinating pursuit, and perhaps produced more sheets of that mysterious stuff which literary people call "copy" than any other author of his age. It would be almost impossible for me adequately to describe the difference between Sigismund Smith as he was known to the very few friends who knew any thing at all about him, and Sigismund Smith as he appeared on paper. In the narrow circle of his home Mr. Smith was a very mild young man, with the most placid blue eyes that ever looked out of a human head, and a good deal of light curling hair. He was a very mild young VOL. X. N man. He could not have hit any one if he had tried ever so; and if you had hit him, I don't think he would have minded-much. It was not in him to be very angry; or to fall in love, to any serious extent; or to be desperate about any thing. Perhaps it was that he exhausted all that was passionate in his nature in penny numbers, and had nothing left for the affairs of real life. People who were impressed by his fictions, and were curious to see him, generally left him with a strong sense of disappointment, if not indignation. They had their own idea of what the author of the Smuggler's Bride and Lilia the Deserted ought to be, and Mr. Smith did not at all come up to the popular standard; so the most enthusiastic admirers of his romances were apt to complain of him as an impostor when they beheld him in private life. Was this meek young man the Byronic hero they had pictured? Was this the author of Colonel Montefiasco, or the Brand upon the Shoulderblade? They had imagined a splendid creature, half magician, half brigand, with a pale face and fierce black eyes, a tumbled mass of raven hair, a bare white throat, a long black-velvet dressing-gown, and thin tapering hands with queer agate and onyx rings coiling up the flexible fingers. And then the surroundings. An oak-panelled chamber, of course -black oak, with grotesque and diabolical carvings jutting out at the angles of the room; a crystal globe upon a porphyry pedestal; a mysterious picture, with a curtain drawn before it-certain death being the fate of him who dared to raise that curtain by so much as a corner. A mantelpiece of black marble, and a collection of pistols and scymetars, swords and yataghans,-especially yataghans,-glimmering and flashing in the firelight. A little show of eccentricity in the way of household pets: a bear under the sofa, and a tame cobra di capella coiled upon the hearthrug. This was the sort of thing the penny public expected of Sigismund Smith; and, lo, here was a young man with perennial inksmudges upon his face, and an untidy chamber in the Temple, with nothing more romantic than a waste-paper basket, a litter of old letters and tumbled proofs, and a cracked teapot simmering upon the hob. This was the young man who described the reckless extravagance of a Montefiasco's sumptuous chamber, the mysterious elegance of a Diana Firmiani's dimly-lighted boudoir. This was the young man in whose works there were more masked doors, and hidden staircases, and revolving picture-frames and sliding-panels, than in all the old houses in Great Britain; and a greater length of vaulted passages than would make an underground railway from the Scottish border to the Land's End. This was the young man who, in an early volume of poems-a failure, as it is the nature of all early volumes of poems to be-had cried in passionate accents to some youthful member of the aristocracy, surname unknown— "Lady Mable, Lady May, no pæan in your praise I'll sing; My shattered lyre all mutely tells The tortured hand that broke the string. Go, fair and false, while jangling bells Through golden waves of sunshine ring; "Now, George," Mr. Smith said, as he pushed away a very dirty inkstand, and wiped his pen upon the cuff of his coat,-"now, George, I can attend to the rights of hospitality. You must be hungry after your journey, poor old boy! What'll you take?" There were no cupboards in the room, which was very bare of furniture, and the only vestiges of any kind of refreshment were a brown crockeryware teapot upon the hob, and a roll and pat of butter upon a plate on the mantelpiece. "Have something?" Sigismund said. "I know there isn't much, because, you see, I never have time to attend to that sort of thing. Have some bread and marmalade?" He drew out a drawer in the desk before which he was sitting, and triumphantly displayed a pot of marmalade with a spoon in it. "Bread and marmalade and cold tea's capital," he said; "you'll try some, George, won't you? and then we'll go home to Camberwell." Mr. Gilbert declined the bread and marmalade; so Sigismund prepared to take his departure. "Morgan's gone into Buckinghamshire for a week's fishing," he said, "so I've got the place to myself. I come here of a morning, you know, work all day, and go home to tea and a chop or a steak in the evening. Come along, old fellow." The young men went out upon the landing. Sigismund locked the black door and put the key in his pocket. They went down-stairs, and through the courts, and across the quadrangles of the Temple, bearing towards that outlet which is nearest Blackfriars Bridge. "You'd like to walk, I suppose, George?" Mr. Smith asked. "Oh, yes; we can talk better walking." They talked a great deal as they went along. They were very fond of one another, and had each of them a good deal to tell; but George wasn't much of a talker as compared to his friend Sigismund. That young man poured forth a perpetual stream of eloquence, which knew no exhaustion. "And so you like the people at Camberwell?" George said. 66 Oh, yes, they're capital people; free-and-easy, you know, and no stupid, stuck-up gentility about them. Not but what Sleaford's a gentleman; he's a barrister. I don't know exactly where his chambers are, or in what court he practises when he's in town; but he is a barrister. I suppose he goes on circuit sometimes, for he's very often away from home for a long time together; but I don't know what circuit he goes on. It doesn't do to ask a man those sort of questions, you see, George; so I hold my tongue. I don't think he's rich, that's to say not rich in a regular way. He's flush of money sometimes, and then you should see |