fellow, and the better it will be for us all in the
end. I can pare a piece of turf up where it will
never be missed, and if master will take one
spade, and I another, why, we'll lay him softly
down, and cover him up, and no one will be the
wiser."

There was no reply from either for a minute or
so. Then Mr. Wilkins said:

"If my father could have known of my living
to this! Why, they will try me as a criminal;
and you, Ellinor! Dixon, you are right. We must
conceal it, or I must cut my throat, for I never
could live through it. One minute of passion,
and my life blasted!"

"Come along, sir," said Dixon; " there's no
lime to lose." And they went out in search of
tools; Ellinor following them, shivering all over,
*but begging that she might be with them, and
not have to remain in the study with  —

She would not be bidden into her own room;
she dreaded inaction aud solitude. She made
herself busy with carrying heavy baskets of turf,
and straining her strength to the utmost; fetching
all that was wanted, with soft swift steps.

Once, as she passed near the open study door,
she thought that she heard a rustling, and a flash
of hope came across her. Could he be reviving?
She entered, but a moment was enough to
undeceive her; it had only been a night rustle among
the trees. Of hope, life, there was none.

They dug the hole deep and well; working
with fierce energy to quench thought and remorse.
Once or twice her father asked for brandy,
which Ellinor, reassured by the apparently good
effect of the first dose, brought to him without
a word; and once at her father's suggestion she
brought food, such as she could find in the dining
room without disturbing the household, for
Dixon.

When all was ready for the reception of the
body in its unblessed grave, Mr. Wilkins bade
Ellinor go up to her room — she had done all she
could to help them; the rest must be done by
them alone. She felt that it must; and indeed
both her nerves and her bodily strength were
giving way. She would have kissed her father,
as he sat wearily at the head of the grave  —
Dixon had gone in to make some arrangement
for carrying the corpse —  but he pushed her away
quietly, but resolutely:

"No, Nelly, you must never kiss me again; I
am a murderer."

"But I will, my own darling papa," said she,
throwing her arms passionately round his neck,
and covering his face with kisses. " I love you,
and I don't care what you are, if you were twenty
times a murderer, which you are not; I am sure
it was only an accident."

"Go in, my child, go in, and try to get some
rest. But go in, for we must finish as fast as
we can. The moon is down; it will soon be daylight.
What a blessing there are no rooms on
one side of the house. Go, Nelly." And she went;
straining herself up to move noiselessly, with
eyes averted, through the room which she
shuddered at as the place of hasty and unhallowed
death.

Once in her own room she bolted the door on
the inside, and then stole to the window, as if
some fascination impelled her to watch all the
proceedings to the end. But her aching eyes
could hardly penetrate through the thick darkness,
which, at the time of the year of which I am
speaking, so closely precedes the dawn. She
could discern the tops of the trees against the
sky, and could single out the well-known one, at
a little distance from the stem of which the
grave was made, in the very piece of turf over
which so lately she and Ralph had had their
merry little tea-making; and where her father,
as she now remembered, had shuddered and
shivered, as if the ground on which his seat had
then been placed, was fateful and ominous to
him.

Those below moved softly and quietly in all
they did; but every sound had a significant and
terrible interpretation to Ellinor's ears. Before
they had ended, the little birds had begun to pipe
out their gay réveillé to the dawn. Then doors
closed, and all was profoundly still.

Ellinor threw herself, in her clothes, on the bed;
and was thankful for the intense weary physical
pain which took off something of the anguish
of thought  —  anguish that she fancied from time
to time was leading to insanity.

By-and-by the morning-cold made her instinctively
creep between the blankets; and, once
there, she fell into a dead heavy sleep.

STREET TERRORS.

GAROTTING is in some measure a new art;
but London criminality has found expression in
past times in forms equally alarming, and sometimes
even more serious. Crime is subject to
caprices of fashion, like other things. There
are, indeed, certain good old solid villanies which
abide from age to age, unaffected by any
mutations of taste; but the eccentricities of
ruffianism obey some law of change, which
causes them to shift their external modes and
aspects. Still, the gross amount of homicidal
ferocity remains pretty much the same, or, if
there be any difference, it is not to the
disadvantage of this epoch. The contemporary
literature of bygone periods depicts to us a series
of Londons ill-guarded, ill-lighted, and teeming
with violence aun rascality. It may be interesting
at the present moment to recal some features
of those extinct conditions of metropolitan
life.

Early in the thirteenth century, according to
an old chronicler, it was " a common practice"
for a company of a hundred or more to " make
nightly invasions upon the houses of the wealthy,
to the intent to rob them; and if they found
any man stirring in the city within the night,
that were not of their crew, they would presently
murder him; insomuch that when night
was come no man durst adventure to walk in the