—I told you there was a second necessity connected
with your present situation, which had not been
provided for yet—- but which must be provided
for, when the time came. The time has come
now. You have a serious difficulty to meet and
conquer, before you can leave your fortune to
your cousin George."

"What difficulty?" he asked.

Mrs. Lecount rose from her chair, without
answering-— stole to the door—- and suddenly
threw it open. No one was listening outside;
the passage was a solitude, from one end to the
other.

"I distrust all servants," she said, returning
to her place—- " your servants particularly. Sit
closer, Mr. Noel. What I have now to say to you
must be heard by no living creature but
ourselves."

SMALL-BEER CHRONICLES.

THE duties of a Small-Beer Chronicler are very
various, and so numerous, that the present
Chronicler sometimes despairs of finding time
to do them any sort of justice. The vats are
filling, and running over continually, before he can
get a chance of registering their contents. And
yet with all this work on his hands he must needs
go out of his way in the very last chronicle
which issued from his pen, and enter on a field
of labour to which he has no call whatsoever. Let
him now promptly get back to his own business,
and chronicle some very small beer indeed, which
will not bear any longer to be kept waiting.

Among all the changes of modern times there
are few more remarkable than those which have
taken place in our small-talk. The whole style of
conversation is changed. The subjects of
conversation and the manner of talking. "Sir,"
Dr. Johnson remarked once, of a long
conversational evening, " Sir, we had good talk." In
that " good talk" how many subjects were treated.
Religion, politics, philosophy, literature, and
many other topics! All sorts of purely abstract
questions were introduced and argued earnestly,
and sometimes even hotly. " Now, sir, with regard
to the good or evil of card-playing?" would be
the commencement of a conversation. " What,
sir, is your opinion of the practice of duelling?"
would be a question heralding a discussion two
hours long, which would terminate, perhaps,
in a purely practical solution of the question.
This was the " good talk" of which the men of
that day were fond.

But without going back to times even so
remote, without even taxing the memory of our
oldest acquaintances, may not any man who has
spent even five-and-thirty years " crawling
between earth and hearen," and who has during tie
early part of his career been tolerably observant
of what went on around him—- may not such an
one remember a time when conversation was
very different indeed from what it is in our own
immediate day? In the dark ages, when the
present century was fat, fair, and forty, there
was still some of that "good talk" left of which
Johnson was fond.  Then, and still more a few
years earlier, it was yet the custom, to start a
topic and discuss it. How warmly, too, men
would talk and argue about things which they
had no concern with. What political strife
there was. What violence of party feeling.
What Tories, Whigs, and Radicals there were
in those days. What exciting debates in the
Houses of Parliament. What exciting debates
on those debates in private circles. A man
would cut off his son with a shilling, or become
estranged from his friend, on a purely public
question, and because the son or the friend would
not agree with him about Reform, or Catholic
Emancipation.

There were professed talkers in those days:
men who were celebrated for their conversational
powers, and who rounded their sentences
handsomely, and raised their voices at the periods:
men whom other men were invited to meet, simply
that they might hear them talk. Conversation
Sharp lived then, and talked his way to a glory
not now to be attained by any amount of dinner-
table eloquence. And many others there were
who earned that same prefix to their names, and
who now would probably be stigmatised as
"bores" before they had got half way through
their first preparatory sentences. It must have
been a curious career that of one of these
professed conversationalists, and one requiring no
small amount of labour and study. Surely, he
must have had to stick to his newspaper in the
morning with a different pertinacity to that
which most readers bring to bear upon the sheet.
He couild not give himself up to an unfettered
enjoyment of the news, dodging about among
the paragraphs, here and there as he felt disposed,
revelling in police reports, battening on horrors,
as the ordinary reader does. On the contrary,
he must have said to himself, " I dine at
Prosehampton to-day with the Tympanums, what will
it be necessary for me to get up- how shall I
make my effects?" Thus a great strain was
upon the conversationalist, even in his moments
of leisure; when arrived at the scene of
display, the trouble must have been greater still.
How difficult it must have been for him to
remember the houses at which a certain favourite
sentence had been let off; how hard to have a
new audience all but one man perhaps, and to
be obliged on his account to forego a piece of
eloquence which would have been quite new and
fresh to the rest of the company; how
terrible, when once launched in a sea of oratory, to
catch some sceptical eye which said, as plainly
as eye could speak-—- " My very dear sir, I think
we have heard all this before."

It must have been a severe trial to both
parties, when two of these professed talkers met
in society. If Conversation Sharp went out to
dinner and found himself at the same table with
Conversation Blunt, what must his sensations
have been? What must Sharp have felt when
he heard Blunt at the other end of the table