avail, at the following board day even the
secretary was not forthcoming. He had left the
keys and his compliments with one of the clerks,
as well as a message, saying that, being far from
well, he would not be able to attend to
business for some days. The absence of all the
directors, except the ex-brewer and I, for two
successive board days, now fully roused my
suspicions. After a little search I found out
and laid hands upon our banker's pass-book, but
only to discover that, beyond two or three
hundred pounds, we had nothing standing to our
credit. The only real bonafide payments that had
been made by directors for their shares were
those few hundreds on the day of our first
board meeting, and the thousand pounds cash
which the ex-brewer and myself had paid. It
was clearly shown, now that we got access to
all the books, that, as fast as payments had been
made, they had been drawn out again; but to
whom these moneys had been paid, or what had
become of what little capital was paid up, we
could not find out. The proofs of the payment
of the directors' notes-of-hand were simply false
entries in the books made in the handwriting of
the secretary. The bank balance now standing
to our credit was simply the result of some few
payments made on account of premiums, since
our last meeting. For two weeks none of the
directors had been near the office, otherwise it
is more than doubtful whether there would have
been a single shilling left.

The ex-brewer—who proved himself a capital
man of business, as well as a most sensible,
kind-hearted fellow—and I held a long
consultation together. The first thing to do,
was, to meet the claim of five hundred pounds
due upon the old lady's policy. This we did at
once, each of us giving a cheque on his own
banker for two hundred and fifty pounds. The
next thing was to prepare and present a petition
for the winding-up in Chancery of the
"Benevolent Life and Fire Insurance Company."
The third step was to keep out of the way,
so as to prevent ourselves being turned into
machines upon which the solicitors of the
different shareholders could serve writs. For
this purpose we betook ourselves to France
until the storm had blown over, and as we—the
ex-brewer and myself— had each lost one
thousand pounds, besides the two hundred and fifty
paid for the claim upon the policy which fell
due, we both felt that we had suffered more
than enough in our pockets, and both took care
to keep dark for two or three years until the
shareholders and other creditors had been
settled with.

As regards our worthy brother directors, I
have only met two of them since. The
Honourable John I saw about three months ago
driving a Hansom cab in Oxford-street. The
M.P.— who a few years ago accepted the
Chiltern Hundreds— is a billiard-marker at a fourth-
rate table in an establishment near Drury-lane.
"Where the rest are, I neither know nor care,
but of one fact I am very certain: which
is, that nothing in the world would ever tempt
me again to become a director of a joint-stock
concern, above all, of a Life and Fire Insurance
Company, whether " limited" or not.

EAVESDROPPING.

IT was all very well for that excellent person,
Caliph Haroun Alraschid, to wander about
Baghdad in disguise, seeing, as we are told, that
"all was quiet," redressing judicial and other
misdoings, and hearing a vast deal of incidental
chit-chat; instructive, no doubt, though of a
character more miscellaneous than usually awoke
the august echoes of the Divan. It was also
very much to the credit of that prince, that, for
the immense amount of personality he must have
had to put up with, nothing provoked him to
demand other satisfaction than such as could be
derived from listening to stories of inordinate
length and more than doubtful authenticity.

How must the grand vizier, Giafar, have enjoyed
those little excursions! How must honest
Mesrour have sniggled in his ample sleeve as the
cool criticism, or the grave yet pungent jest,
smote on the imperial ear, and the eyes of the
commander of the Faithful, turning unconsciously
towards his followers, seemed to inquire how
they relished the fun!

Admitting the advantages that might
occasionally arise from such a system of imperial
eavesdropping— as, for instance, from the
establishment of a Caliphate of the Keyhole, for the
inspection of the Patent and other offices,
studiously unprotected by act of parliament—
one cannot altogether dismiss from the mind a
sense of unfairness in thus taking your seat
invisibly at a council to which you have not been
duly elected. Conversation, like dress, has its
moments of negligence and dishabille. No man
particularly wishes his most esteemed
aquiantance to walk in at the moment when, half shaved
and a quarter dressed, he is envying the "noble
savage" who had the advantage of us in economy
of time by at least an hour a day.

So, in conference, it would cast a certain
restraint over the most loyal company in the world,
were it possible that our most gracious sovereign
—whom the gods preserve!— were stationed on
the landing-place, attended by a discreet lady
in waiting and a trusty maid of honour, all with
ears on the strain for what they might receive.

No, it was a decided mistake of Caliph Haroun
Alraschid's; and, but for the strict adherence to
fact which characterises those Arabian annals in
which he figures, we should be disposed to
question if so truly wise a man ever acted in the
manner described.

Duplicity of any kind is, to use a commercial
phrase, an unsound investment. It may return,
for the time, an unhealthily large dividend, but
the end is usually collapse. As if the powers
that love and wait on truth look coldly upon all
that is disingenuous, whatever be its motive;
little indeed is the amount of actual advantage