an unseen power. At worst, it is only some
trick of the agent's, of which I have suffered
myself to be the dupe." Still a weight hung
over him. Next morning he dared not go to
the factory, but remained brooding at home,
and while he was yet thinking what evil might
come to him from having put his name to the
agent's paper, a letter was brought him. It was
from a solicitor's firm which had just started
business in the town, and the words seemed to
dance before his eyes as he read that Sir John
Gore, the great judge, who had once come to
his house and noticed his model, had died childless,
leaving his whole fortune of ten thousand
pounds a year to James Wright, as a mark of
the admiration he had conceived for a man who
was self-educated.

Jem rushed out of doors, with the letter
crumpled in his hand, and found knots of the
factory hands earnestly speaking together. One,
coming up to him, says: " I see by your manner
you have heard the news."

"What news?" says Jem, startled by the
idea that his private affairs should be known to
many, before he had so much as inquired into
the truth of his letter. " What news?"
Many voices answered: " Why, the great bank
in which the young squire had put his money
has broke, and he is ruined."

On he went to the solicitors, more dazed than
ever, and there he learned that all was true.
He was the possessor of ten thousand pounds
a year; the squire was ruined, and had fled no
one knew where.

The great house was soon for sale, and Jem,
full of the thoughts of the good he would do to
all around him, bought it. But with its possession
did not come happiness. A weight oppressed
his mind. He wandered through the big library,
and took down one book after another, but none
pleased him. He unpacked his model, but
though he now had every tool and every requisite
for its completion, his art seemed gone from
him. He could not remember the scheme
which had ever been working in his mind while
he lived in the cottage; and he thought that
now, indeed, he was miserable. He wandered
through the large deserted rooms, until he came
to one he had never before entered. It was
small and beautifully fitted up. A bit of
unfinished work lay on the table, and by it a book
of manuscript poems. His heart beat fast as he
recognised page after page of his own verses
copied in a hand he knew; for he had one
day found part of a letter bearing the initials
M. W., and had kept it as a treasure ever since.
Now, he found notes on his poems traced by her
hand — passages marked, in which he had
described her as the hope and guiding-star of his
life. He seized his hat and rushed off to the
vicarage. " Fool that I am," he thought;
"this, then, is why all my wealth fails to make
me happy. She is free. She has a soul to be
stirred by lines written by me and inspired by her.
I have only to win her, and the happiness l fail
to find in riches will come to me through her."

He found her alone in the vicar's little
parlour, sketching the mill-stream which ran under
the windows of the home of her childhood. She
started, and a slight flush tinged her cheek, but
he stood by her striving to say something of
the faithful representation of a scene so familiar
to them both. But words would not come at
his bidding, and after a few moments of
embarrassed silence he left her to wonder why he was
so strange.

He haunted her walks, he followed her
wherever she went; but she shunned him.
Once more he sought seclusion in his new home,
and listlessly took up the county journal to which
he had so often contributed. The first thing
in it that caught his eye, was a paragraph
extolling a wonderful discovery made by a young
man named Henry North, about which all the
scientific world was raving. As he read on,
and recognised in the description, the mechanism
of his own model, he shrieked in despair: " It
is mine—the model I spent years of my life
in making—the object of my wretched existence
and he has robbed me of that too!"

In his agony he sprang out of his chair:—I
need not tell you, to find himself just awake,
and alone in the darkness of his cottage. The
church clock struck three, and he thought:
"Can it be that the lesson of a lifetime has
been taught me in a sleep of a few hours?
The lesson that I have the intellect which God
has given me, and that I ought to have the
steady energy and quiet patience and purpose
to use it?"

He did use it. He left off vapouring about
himself and about others, and he went to work
with a modest heart though a brave one. He
used his energy to good purpose, sir. He is
now a well-to-do man, though he has not the
great wealth of the young squire; but he lives
in the cottage by the paper-mill, and it is more
than three years since he brought Miss Mabel
home to it as his bride, and they keep their
parlour-maid, and she keeps her pony-chair,
but they live as simple as though they were
nothing more than ourselves.

Stitched in a cover, price Fourpence,
MUGBY JUNCTION.
THE EXTRA NUMBER FOR CHRISTMAS.

MR. CHARLES DICKENS'S READINGS.
MR. CHARLES DICKENS will read at Newcastle on Monday
the 4th and Tuesday the 5th of March ; at St James's
Hall, London, on Tuesday the 12th ; at Dublin on the 15th,
16th, 17th, 18th, 21st, and 22nd ; at Belfast on the 20th of
March; and at St. James's Hall on the 26th of March.