distantly related to the deceased, and who had been,
in point of station, the most eminent of Dr. Lloyd's
partisans in the controversy with myself; a man
of no great scholastic acquirements, but of
respectable abilities. He had that kind of power
which the world concedes to respectable abilities,
when accompanied with a temper more than
usually stern, and a moral character more than
usually austere. His ruling passion was to sit in
judgment upon others; and, being a magistrate,
he was the most active and the most rigid of all
the magistrates L—— had ever known.

Mr. Vigors at first spoke of me with great
bitterness, as having ruined, and in fact killed, his
friend by the uncharitable and unfair acerbity
which he declared I had brought into what ought
to have been an unprejudiced examination of
simple matter of fact. But finding no sympathy in
these charges, he had the discretion to cease from
making them, contenting himself with a solemn
shake of his head if he heard my name mentioned
in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or
two, such as "Time will show;" "All's well that
ends well," &c. Mr. Vigors, however, mixed
very little in the more convivial intercourse of
the townspeople. He called himself domestic;
but, in truth, he was ungenial. A stiff man,
starched with self-esteem. He thought that his
dignity of station was not sufficiently acknowledged
by the merchants of Low Town, and his
superiority of intellect not sufficiently
recognised by the exclusives of the Hill. His visits
were, therefore, chiefly confined to the houses
of neighbouring squires, to whom his reputation
as a magistrate, conjoined with his solemn
exterior, made him one of those oracles by
which men consent to be awed on condition that
the awe is not often inflicted. And though he
opened his house three times a week, it was only
to a select few, whom he first fed and then biologised.
Electro-biology was very naturally the
special entertainment of a man whom no
intercourse ever pleased in which his will was not
imposed upon others. Therefore he only invited
to his table persons whom he could stare into
the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that
beef was lamb, or brandy was coffee, according
as he willed them to say. And, no doubt, the
persons asked would have said anything he willed
so long as they had, in substance as well as in
idea, the beef and the brandy, the lamb and the
coffee. I did not, then, often meet Mr. Vigors
at the houses in which I occasionally spent my
evenings. I heard of his enmity as a man safe
in his home hears the sough of a wind on a common
without. If now and then we chanced to
pass in the streets, he looked up at me (he was a
small man walking on tiptoe) with the sullen
scowl of dislike. And, from the height of my
stature, I dropped upon the small man and sullen
scowl the affable smile of supreme indifference.

CHAPTER IV.

I HAD now arrived at that age when an
ambitious man, satisfied with his progress in the
world without, begins to feel, in the cravings
of unsatisfied affection, the void of a solitary
hearth. I resolved to marry, and looked out for
a wife. I had never hitherto admitted into my
life the passion of love. In fact, I had regarded
that passion, even in my earlier youth, with a
certain superb contempt—as a malady engendered
by an effeminate idleness, and fostered by a sickly
imagination.

I wished to find in a wife a rational companion,
an affectionate and trustworthy friend. No
views of matrimony could be less romantic, more
soberly sensible, than those which I conceived.
Nor were my requirements mercenary or
presumptuous. I cared not for fortune; I asked
nothing from connexions. My ambition was
exclusively professional; it could be served by no
titled kindred, accelerated by no wealthy dower. I
was no slave to beauty. I did not seek in a wife the
accomplishments of a finishing school-teacher.

Having decided that the time had come to
select my helpmate, I imagined that I should
find no difficulty in a choice that my reason would
approve. But day upon day, week upon week,
passed away, and though among the families I
visited there were many young ladies who
possessed more than the qualifications with which I
conceived that I should be amply contented, and
by whom I might flatter myself that my proposals
would not be disdained, I saw not one to whose
lifelong companionship I should not infinitely
have preferred the solitude I found so irksome.

One evening, in returning home from visiting
a poor female patient whom I attended
gratuitously, and whose case demanded more thought
than that of any other in my list, for though it
had been considered hopeless in the hospital, and
she had come home to die, I felt certain that I
could save her, and she seemed recovering under
my care;—one evening, it was the fifteenth of
May, I found myself just before the gates of the
house that had been inhabited by Dr. Lloyd.
Since his death the house had been unoccupied;
the rent asked for it by the proprietor was
considered high; and from the sacred Hill on which
it was situated, shyness or pride banished the
wealthier traders. The garden gates stood wide
open, as they had stood in the winter night on which
I had passed through them to the chamber of death.
The remembrance of that death-bed came vividly
before me, and the dying man's fantastic threat
rang again in my startled ears. An irresistible
impulse, which I could not then account for, and
which I cannot account for now—an impulse the
reverse of that which usually makes us turn away
with quickened step from a spot that recals
associations of pain—urged me on through the
open gates, up the neglected, grass-grown road;
urged me to look, under the westering sun of the
joyous spring, at that house which I had never
seen but in the gloom of a winter night, under
the melancholy moon. As the building came in
sight, with dark red bricks, partially overgrown
with ivy, I perceived that it was no longer
unoccupied. I saw forms passing athwart the open