conscience painfully tender. She is surrounded,
I fear, by many things that jar on her high
sense of what is right and good."

"She made no special confidence to you, did
she?"

"None. I invited her to do so as gently
and as tenderly as I could. But I thought it
would have been cruel and unwise to persist,
when I saw how the attempt distressed her."

When Mabel returned home, she found her
mother in as near an approach to an ill humour
as she ever indulged in.

"My dear Mabel!" she exclaimed, reproachfully,
"why did you go out in that manner?
I have been so uneasy about you!"

"I am very sorry, dear mamma. You were
not at hand, but I left word where I was gone to."

"Oil yes; it was not that. I did not fear
that you were lost. But really, my child, you
will wear yourself out. Running about from
one sick house to another in this way! Everybody
we know seems to be plunged into affliction.
I'm sure it's dreadful. You might as
well be a Sister of Mercy at once!"

Mrs. Saxelby pronounced the last words as
though they conveyed something very shocking
indeed.

Mabel made what excuse she could, and
proceeded to give such a moving account of little
Corda Trescott's state, that her mother was
melted into sympathy at once. Then Mabel
asked if her cousin had been to Desmond Lodge
that morning, and whether there had been any
news of Walter Charlewood. Jack had been,
and would come again. Mr. M'Culloeh said
there had been no tidings as yet. In the
afternoon Jack appeared. Mabel hurried into the
garden with an anxious questioning face.

"What news, Jack? Has anything been
heard?"

"Nothing of Walter. It begins to look bad,
I think. I should not wonder if he had gone
off abroad. But you remember what I told
you of those anonymous letters? Well,
M'Culloch has just been telling me the crowning
mystery of the whole affair. There has
arrived at his office it had been misdirected, and
had gone astray a letter (also anonymous),
begging him in the most earnest manner not to
give any heed to calumnies against Mr. Clement
Charlewood. The writer evidently knows
something of Charlewood' s secret enemy,
whoever he is. But it is the queerest composition.
M'Culloeh showed it to me, and I could make
nothing of it, except that the person who wrote
really seemed anxious that no injustice should
be done to Charlewood. And at the same time
there seems an odd desire to screen his
anonymous persecutor!"

At this instant Dooley came up to Jack's
side with a face of great importance, holding a
paper in his hand.

"I've dot a letter," he cried, triumphantly.

"Go away now, dear boy," said his sister.
"Cousin Jack will see it by-and-by."

"Won't 'oo 'ook at my letter?" persisted
Dooley, holding it up.

Jack cast his eyes on the paper, and, with a
loud exclamation, snatched it from the child
and examined it closely.

"Who wrote this?" he asked.

"Corda—Corda Trescott," answered Mabel,
gazing at him in bewilderment.

"Then," said Jack, emphatically, "as surely
as you and I are standing here, Corda Trescott
is one of M'Culloch's anonymous
correspondents!"

"Jack, what are you saying? It is
impossible!"

"If Corda Trescott wrote this, Corda Trescott
wrote the letter I saw this morning. I
would swear to it. They are both written in
pencil too, which renders it easier to identify
the hand. Dooley, old fellow, you must lend
me this letter of yours for a time. And if I'm
not much mistaken, it will prove to be the most
valuable bit of correspondence you ever got in
your life!"

                     TWO PLAGUES.

IT was Edgar Allen Poe, I think, who de-
scribed with the horrible minuteness of an
anatomical demonstrator the slow but never-
ceasing growth of a fungus in his lungs. He
called it "his fungus," as he would his hand or
his heart, or any portion of himself. All the
nutriment he took fattened his fungus, and if
his veins ran bounding under the influence of
good wine, the fungus throbbed in unison with
his pulse. Daily and hourly the victim knew
that his enemy was growing larger and more
solid; he felt that this animal within an animal
would at last occupy and choke the passages of
the life-breath, and he waited with the
resignation of despair for the end. The perusal of
Edgar Poe's paper made me miserably
nervous for a month. I fancied, and then believed,
that I also carried within myself my inevitable
destroyer. I had undoubtedly a choking feeling
when I dined out, and supposed it was "my"
fungus. A course of salmon-fishing and a few
dozen of sound claret—not the chancellor's—
banished the delusion, and to-day I would be a
comparatively happy man were I not plagued by
a nephew.

My nephew's name is Mark, and he has
"walked the London hospitals" for two years.
He will persist in unfolding to me some of the
theories he has heard or invented. I suppose
he is anxious to prove that he attends diligently
at lectures, &c. There is nothing to ruffle one's
equanimity in supposing with him that life is
but electricity after all, and that we are moved
to liking or disliking by positive or negative
currents passing between two souls. He did
agitate my curate not a little by that theory which
he lately broached regarding contagion. All
kinds of epidemic disease, he insisted, are
propagated by minute corpuscles enclosed in
"spore cists" floating in the air, but invisible to
the eye. My curate is blessed with a numerous
young family, and was not altogether comfortable