N the still hours of the night; in the evening rest from labour-when the twilight shadows darken my solitary room, and oftentimes in the broad glare of day, amongst the eager, busy merchants upon 'Change-it comes before me: the picture of my lost shadowy home. So dim and indistinct at times seems the line that separates my past from my present self-so dream-like seem the events that have made me the hunted outcast which I am-that, painful as my history is, it is a mental relief to me to go over it step by step, and dwell upon the faces of those who are now lost to me for

evermore.

It seems but yesterday-although many years have passed away-that I was in a position of trust in the counting-house of Askew, Dobell, and Picard. I entered the service of these merchants about the age of sixteen, fresh from the Blue-Coat School; a raw, ungainly lad, with no knowledge or experience of the world, and with a strong letter of recommendation from the head master, which procured me a junior clerkship. Our business was conducted with a steady tranquillity-an almost holy calm-in harmony with the place, which had the air of a sacred temple dedicated to commerce. I rose step by step; till at last, about the age of thirty, I attained the position of first-class clerk. My advance was not due to any remarkable ability that I had displayed; nor because I had excited the interest of any member of the firm, for I seldom saw the faces of my employers. It was purely the result of a system which ordained a general rise throughout the house when any old clerk died or was pensioned off.

The third partner in the firm, Mr. Picard, was a man of a very different stamp from the other two. At one period he had been our managing clerk, and he obtained his share in the business in the same year that I entered the house. He was of French extraction; thin, sallow, with small grey eyes, and light sandy hair. His age at the time I

am writing of must have been near fifty. Although his origin was very obscure-some of our old clerks remembering him walking about the docks in an almost shoeless state-his pride was very great, and his harshness, sternness, and uneasy, fretful, and ever-conscious attempts at dignity, were a painful contrast to the quiet, off-hand manner of Mr. Dobell, or the venerable and dreamy calmness of old Mr. Askew. He was a bad-hearted, cold, calculating man-a man with a strong, reckless will, who allowed nothing to stand between him and his self-interest. When he came into authority, and had his name put up as one of the firm, his humble relations were removed to a distance; and a poor old Irishwoman who had kept a fruit-stall upon sufferance under our gateway for many years, was swept away, because he felt that she remembered him in the days of his poverty.

My position and duties required me to live in the house, and to take charge of the place. When I married, I took my wife, Esther, to our old City home, and our one child, little Margaret, was born there. The child was a little blue-eyed, fair-haired thing; and it was a pleasing sight to see her, between two and three years of age, trotting along the dark passages, and going carefully up the broad oaken stairs. On one occasion she was checked, by the order of Mr. Picard, for making a noise during business hours; and, from ten to five, she had to confine herself to her little dingy room at the top of the house. She was a great favourite with many of the old childless clerks, who used to bring her presents of fruit in the summer mornings. Scarcely a day passed but what I stole an hourmy dinner hour-to play with her; and, in the long summer evenings, I carried her down to the river to watch the boats. Sometimes, on Sundays, I took her out of the City into the fields about Canonbury, and carried her back again loaded with buttercups. She was a companion to me-oftentimes my only companion, with her innocent prattle, and gentle, winning ways-for my wife, Esther, was

cold and reserved in her manners, with settled habits, formed before our marriage. She was an earnest Baptist, and attended regularly, three times a week, a chapel for that persuasion in Finsbury. My home often looked cheerless enough when little Margaret had retired to bed and my wife's empty chair stood before me; but I did not complainit would not have been just for me to do so-for I knew Esther's opinions and habits before I married her; yet I thought I discerned, beneath the hard sectarian crust, signs of a true, womanly, loving heart; signs, amongst the strict faith and stern principles, of an affection equal to my own. I may have been mistaken in her, as she was mistaken— oh, how bitterly mistaken-in me! Her will was stronger than mine, and it fretted itself silently, but incessantly, in vain endeavours to lead me along the path she had chosen for herself. She may have misunderstood my resistance, as I may have misapprehended her motives for desiring to alter my habits and tone of thinking. There were probably faults and errors on both sides.

Thus we went on from day to day; Esther going in her direction and I going in mine, while the child acted as a gentle link that bound us together.

About this time Mr. Askew finally retired from business, and there was a general step upward throughout the house - Mr. Picard getting one degree nearer absolute authority. The first use that he made of his new power was to introduce an only son into the counting-house, who had not been regularly brought up to the ranks of trade; but who had received, since his father's entrance as a member of the firm, a loose, hurried, crammed, half-professional education, and who had hovered for some time between the choice of a lawyer's office and a doctor's consulting-room. He was a high-spirited young man, whose training had been of that incomplete character which had only served to unsteady him. He had his father's fault of a strong, reckless will, unchecked by anything like his father's cold, calculating head; though tempered by a virtue that his father never possessed-an open-hearted generosity. As he had everything to learn, and was a troublesome pupil, he was assigned to my care. His writing-table was brought into my office, and I had plenty of opportunity of judging of his character. With all his errors and shortcomings-not to say vices-it was impossible not to like him. There is always a charm about a free, impulsive nature, that carries the heart where the judgment cannot follow. Although more than ten years his senior, I held and claimed no authority over him; his more powerful will and bolder spirit holding me in subjection. I screened the fact of his late arrivals, and his frequent absences, by doing his work for him; and, for anything that Mr. Dobell or his father knew, he was the most

Little Margaret

promising clerk in the house. soon found him out, and took a childish liking to him. He was never tired of playing with her; and seldom a week passed that he did not bring her something new in the shape of toys or sweetmeats. My evenings at home, which used to be solitary, were now solitary no longer; either he came and kept me company, unknown to his father-who would have been indignant at his associating with one of the ordinary clerks-or (which was most frequently the case) I accompanied him in his evening rambles about town. The gulf between me and Esther was greatly widened.

Thus our lives went on in the old City mansion, with little variety, until our child completed her third year.

Young Mr. Picard had been absent from the office for more than a week, and illness, as usual, was pleaded as the cause. In about four days more he returned, looking certainly much thinner and paler than usual. I did not question him then as to the real cause of his absence; for there were arrears to work up, and he did not seem in a communicative humour. This was on a Saturday. On the following Monday, at about two o'clock in the afternoon, he brought in a cheque for five hundred pounds, drawn by the firm upon our bankers, Messrs. Burney, Holt, and Burney, of Lombard Street. This, he told me, was an amount he had got his father and Mr. Dobell to advance him for a short period, to enter upon a little speculation on his own account, and he gave it to me to get changed when I went down to the bankers to pay in money on the same afternoon. In the meantime, he induced me to give him two hundred pounds on account, out of the cash that I, as cashier, had received during the day. Shortly afterwards he went away, saying he would receive the other portion in the morning. I went to the bankers that afternoon, cashed the cheque for five hundred pounds, returned the two hundred to my cash charge, paid it into the credit of the firm, and returned to the office with the three hundred pounds in my possession, in bank-notes, for young Mr. Picard when he came me in the morning. I never saw him again, and never shall, in this world.

As to the cheque-it was a forgery. The bankers had discovered it later in the evening, and I was taken into custody, with the bank-notes in my pocket-book, by a Bow Street officer, acting under Mr. Picard, Senior's, orders. My wife was not at home. Casting, therefore, one hurried glance at my poor, unconscious, sleeping child—a glance in which were concentrated the love and agony of a lifetime-I turned my back upon the old house to go with the officer to the appointed prison.

The next morning, at the preliminary examination before a magistrate, the charge was made out.

I took a lodging at a small public-house at Wapping, near the river; and I neglected no means to escape observation. I waited with a beating, anxious heart impatiently for night; and, when it came, I went forth well disguised, keeping along the line of the docks and silent warehouses,

in the front, and I went cautiously round, up a side lane, and along a narrow passage that ran between the churchyard and the back of the house. At that moment the church-clock struck eight, and the bells chimed the Evening Hymn, slowly and musically, as they had done, perhaps, for centuries; slowly and musically, as they had done in the days

until I reached the end of the lane in which the old mansion stood. I did not dare to make any inquiry to know if Esther and the child were still at the old home; but my knowledge of the character and prospects of my wife told me that, if the firm allowed her to stay, she would have accepted the offer, as her principles and determination would have sustained her under any feelings of disgrace. I walked slowly up the old familiar lane, until I stood before the gateway. It was near eight o'clock, and the gate was closed, but it looked the same as it did when I first knew it as a boy; so did the quaint oak carving, and the silent court-yard seen

gone by, while I sat at the window with little Margaret in my arms, nursing her to sleep. A flood of memories came across my heart. Forgetful of the object that had brought me there, I leant against the railings and wept.

The chimes ceased, and the spell was broken. I was recalled to the momentous task that lay before me. I approached, with a trembling step, the window of what used to be our sitting-room, on the ground-floor. I saw lights through the crevices of the closed shutters. Putting my ear closely against the wall I heard the hum of voices. Faint, confused, and indistinct as the sound was, some

uth four voyage, and dari another convict, kel up y an American chet as to what we ely in New York. My an i I entered the service ani worked steadily for four in which the vision of my ustantly before me. Any feeling it that I may have had at the suspicions of my wife, and at her seeming indifference to my fate, was now completely obliterated by the operation of time and distance, and the old love I gave to her as a girl came back in all its tenderness and force. She appeared to me as the guardian and protector of my dear fatherless child, whom I had left sleeping innocently in her little bed on the night when the door of my lost home closed upon My dreams by night, my one thought by day, grew in intensity, until I could resist the impulse no longer. Risking the chance of discovery, I procured a passage, and landed in London in the

me.