to the Bengal Civil Service, but since dead,
was taken very ill with jungle fever in the
north-west, and was recommended to proceed
down the Indus, and so, viâ Kurrachie and
Bombay, to England. I obtained leave to accompany
him to the western presidency, and see
him safe on board the steamer for Suez. But
by the time we arrived in Bombay he felt so
much better, that he resolved not to lose his
Indian allowances by going home, but to try
whether he could not restore himself to health
by a sea voyage to China. I wrote to my regiment,
and obtained leave again to go on with
him to Singapore, where, if better, he would
proceed on to Hong-Kong, and I would return to
Calcutta. If not recovered, he was to go round
with me to the City of Palaces, and there take
a passage round the Cape to Europe, as the
medical men in Bombay appeared all of opinion
that nothing would do him so much good as a
long sea voyage. We left Bombay in a sailing
vessel, an opium clipper belonging to one of the
great Parsee firms. There were four or five
other passengers on board, and among them a
young officer who had lately exchanged from one
of her Majesty's regiments in Bombay to another
corps in Australia, and was on his way to China,
where he hoped to find some vessel bound to
Melbourne. Our ship was a very comfortable
vessel, well found in everything, but all the way
down the coast we had the most extraordinary
light winds, and often calms, which made the
voyage extremely tedious. We had been just
a fortnight at sea, were out of sight of land,
had not touched anywhere, nor had we
communicated with any other ship, when the young
officer of whom I have spoken was one night
taken extremely ill, and the two medical
men we had on board—one being the surgeon
of the ship, the other a doctor belonging
to the Madras army—at once declared him
to be suffering from a very bad attack of Asiatic
cholera. He lived about twenty-four hours, and
then died from exhaustion. The doctors did all
they could for him, but almost from the very
first his case was declared by them both to be
hopeless. It may be easily imagined that even
the most courageous amongst us were not a
little frightened at what had happened, and
fully expected that others would fall victims to
the same complaint. The crew of the vessel
consisted of native Lascars, the captain and chief
officer only being Englishmen, as is usual in
ships employed on what is called "the country
trade." The day after the young Englishman
died, three Lascars were taken ill; of these, one
died and two recovered. After that, we had not
a single case in the ship, and everybody on
board enjoyed the most perfect health until we
arrived at our destination some three weeks
later.

Whilst relating these anecdotes, I have
purposely omitted putting forward any theory of
my own as to whether the cholera is infectious,
or contagious, or both, or neither. In fact, I
have no theory to put forth. What I have told
in this paper are simply facts that happened in
my presence, so to speak, during a prolonged
service in the East, and which would almost lead
to the conclusion that even of what we call
Asiatic cholera there is more than one kind,
and that the complaint may be brought on
sometimes quite irrespective of bad drainage, dirty
dwellings, or unhealthy food. But, as I said
when I began this paper, I am not a medical
man, and I leave others to draw their inferences
from the instances I have related.

HALF A MILLION OF MONEY.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "BARBARA'S HISTORY."

CHAPTER LXXIX. O BELLA ETA DELL' ORO!

CAREWORN and intent, his lips pressed
nervously together, his brow contracted, his eyes,
hand, and pen, all travelling swiftly in concert,
William Trefalden bent over his desk, working
against time, against danger, against fate. All
that day long, and half the night before, he had
been sitting in the same place, labouring at the
same task, and his work was now drawing to a
close. Piles of letters, papers, memoranda,
deeds, and account-books crowded the table.
A waste-paper basket, full to overflowing, was
placed to the left of Mr. Trefalden's chair, and a
large cash-box to the right of his desk. Although
it was only the fifteenth of September, and the
warm evening sunlight was pouring in through
the open window, a fire burned in the grate.
The fragments clinging to the bars and the
charred tinder-heap below, indicated plainly
enough for what purpose that fire had been
kindled.

The sun sank lower and lower. The sullen,
roar of the great thoroughfare rose and fell, and
never ceased. The drowsy City clocks, roused
up for a few moments and grown suddenly
garrulous, chimed the quarters every now and then,
and, having discharged that duty, dozed off again
directly. Then the last glow faded from the
house-tops, and the pleasant twilight—pleasant
even in City streets and stifling offices—came
gently over all.

Still Mr. Trefalden worked on; his eager pen
now flying over the page, now arrested at the
base of a column of figures, now laid aside for
several minutes at a time. Methodically,
resolutely, rapidly, the lawyer pursued his task; and
it was a task both multifarious and complicated,
demanding all the patience of which he was
master, and taxing his memory to the uttermost.
He had told his clerks that he was going out of
town for six weeks, and was putting his papers
in order before starting; but it was not so. He
was going away, far away, never to set foot in
that office again. He was turning his back upon
London, upon England, upon his cousin Saxon,
for ever and ever.

He had intended to do this weeks before.
His plans had been all matured long enough in
advance. He was to have been in Madeira,
perhaps many an ocean-league further still, by this