farewell of him and Harriet. Then he would
return to London, and throw himself into business
at once. There was plenty for him to
do at The Mercury, the chief had said, and——
No! he must not go back to London, he must
not expose himself to temptation; at all events,
until he was more capable of resisting it. Now,
there would be Routh, with his jovial blandishments,
and Deane, and all the set, and Harriet.
most dangerous of all! In London he would
fall back into George Dallas, the outcast, the
reprobate, the black sheep, not rise into Paul
Ward, the genius; and it was under the latter
name that he had made acquaintance with Clare,
and that he hoped to rise into fame and
repute.

But though the young man had, as he imagined,
fully made up his mind as to his future course,
he lounged through a whole day in Amsterdam
before he took the first step necessary for its
pursuance — the negotiation of the bracelet and the
transmission of the money to Routh — and it is
probable that any movement in the matter would
have been yet further delayed had he not come
to the end of the slender stock of money which
he had brought with him from England. The
reaction from a life of fevered excitement to
one of perfect calm, the atmosphere of
comfortable, quiet, staid tranquillity by which he
was surrounded, the opportunity for indulging
his artistic sympathies without the slightest
trouble, all these influences were readily
adopted by a man of George Dallas's desultory
habits and easy temperament; but, at last, it was
absolutely necessary that some action should be
taken, and George consulted the polyglot waiter
of the hotel as to the best means of disposing
of some valuable diamonds which he had with
him.

The question was evidently one to which the
polyglot waiter was well accustomed, for he
answered at once, "Dimants to puy is best by
Mr. Dieverbrug, in Muiderstraat."

Not thoroughly comprehending the instance
of the polyglottiness of the polyglot, George
Dallas again advanced to the charge, and by
varying his methods of attack, and diligently
patching together such intelligible scraps as
he rescued from the polyglot, he at length
arrived at the fact that Mr. Dieverbrug, a Jew,
who lived in the Muiderstraat, was a diamond
merchant in a large way of business, speaking
English, frequently visiting England, and likely
to give as good, if not a better price than any
one else in the trade. The polyglot added that
he himself was not a bad judge of what he
persisted in calling " dimants;" and as this speech
was evidently a polite hint, George showed him
the stones. The polyglot admired them very
much, and pronounced them, in his opinion, worth
between two and three hundred pounds — a valuable
hint to George, who expected Mr. Dieverbrug
would call upon him to name his price, and if
any absurd sum was asked, the intending vendor
might be looked upon with suspicion. The polyglot
then owned that he himself frequently did
a little business in the way of jewel-purchasing
from visitors to the hotel, but frankly
confessed that the " lot" under consideration was
beyond him ; so George thanked him and set out
to visit Mr. Dieverbrug.

The Muiderstraat is the Jews' quarter of
Amsterdam, which said, it is scarcely necessary to
add that it is the dirtiest, the foulest, the most
evil-smelling. There all the well-known
characteristics of such places flourish more
abundantly even than in the Frankfort Judengasse
or our own Houndsditch. There each house is
the repository of countless suits of fusty clothes,
heaped up in reckless profusion on the floors,
bulging out from cupboards and presses,
horribly suggestive of vermin, hanging from poles
protruded from the windows. There every
cellar bristles with an array of boots of all kinds
and shapes, amongst which the little Hebrew
children squall, and fight, and play at their
little games of defrauding each other. There
are the bric-à-brac shops, crammed with cheap
odds and ends from every quarter of the globe,
all equally undistinguishable under an impartial
covering of dust and dirt; there are the
booksellers, with their wormeaten folios and their
copies of the Scriptures, and their written
announcements in the Hebrew character; there
are the cheap printsellers, with smeary copies
from popular pictures and highly-coloured daubs
of French battle-fields and English hunting
-scenes. The day was fine, and nearly all the
population was either standing outside its doors
or lolling at its windows, chaffering, higgling,
joking, scolding. George Dallas, to whom
such a scene was an entire novelty, walked
slowly along with difficulty, threading his way
through the various groups, amused with all he
saw, and speculating within himself as to the
probable personal appearance of Mr. Dieverbrug.
The diamond-merchant, George
imagined, would probably be an old man, with
grey hair and spectacles, and a large hooked
nose, like one of Rembrandt's "Misers," seated
in a small shop, surrounded by the rarest
treasures exquisitely set. But when he arrived at
the number which the polyglot had given him
as Mr. Dieverbrug's residence, he found a
small shop indeed, but it was a bookseller's,
and it was not until after some little time that
he spied a painted inscription on the door-post,
directing Mr. Dieverbrug's visitors to the first
floor, whither George at once proceeded.

At a small wooden table, on which stood a
set of brass balance weights, sat a man of
middle height and gentlemanly appearance,
dressed in black. The Hebraic character was
not strongly marked in any of his features,
though it was perceptible to an acute observer
in the aquiline nose and the full red lips. He
raised his eyes from a small red leather
memorandum-book or diary which he had been studying
as Dallas entered the room, and gave his
visitor a grave salutation.

"Am I addressing Mr. Dieverbrug?" said
Dallas, in English.

"I am Mr. Dieverbrug," he replied, in the
same language, speaking with perfect ease and