keeping; fifty thousand Acts, and a hundred
thousand Caps, and five hundred thousand
Secs, notwithstanding.

"For, Beast of Prey, above the perplexed
letter of all Law that has any might in it,
goes the spirit. If I be, as I claim to be,
the child of Justice, and not the offspring of
the Artful Dodger, that spirit shall, before I
gabble through one legal argument more,
provide for you and all the like of you, as
you deserve. If it cannot do that of itself,
I will have letter to help it. But I will not
remain here, a spectacle and a scandal to
those who are the breath of my nostrils, with
your dirty hands clinging to my robe, your
brazen lungs misrepresenting me, your
shameless face beslavering me in my
prostitution."

Thus the Law clearly would address any
such impossible person. For this reason,
among others not dissimilar, I glory in the
Law, and am ready at all times to shed my
best blood to uphold it. For this reason too,
I am proud, as an Englishman, to know that
such a design upon a woman as I have, in a
wild moment, imagined, is not to be entered
upon, and is—as it ought to be—one of the
things that can never be done.

LANNA TIXEL.

Under a stiff hollybush cut like a dragon,
the chief glory in the garden of her father
the Burgomaster, little Lanna Tixel lay with
her face to the grass, sobbing and quivering.
Ten minutes ago she had passed silently out
of her father's sick chamber with a white
face and eyes large with terror; she had fled
through the great still house into the garden,
and fallen down under the dragon to give
way to an agony of something more than
childish grief. Poor little Lanna! Sheltered
by the prickly wings of that old garden
monster, she had wept many a time for the
loss of a pale, blue-eyed mother, who had
gone from her to be one of the stars; but that
was a grief full of love and tenderness, that
led to yearnings heavenward. She lay then
grieving with her tearful eyes fixed on the
blue sky, watching the clouds or wondering
which of the first stars of evening might be
the bright soul of her saint. Now she had
her face pressed down into the earth—her
father was on his death-bed; but there was
something wilder in her agony than childish
sorrow. In the twilight the green dragon
seemed to hang like a real fiend over the
plump little child that had been thrown to it,
and that lay cowering within reach of its jaws.

So perhaps thought the sallow-faced Hans
Dank, the leanest man in the Low Countries
and yet no skeleton; who, after a time, had
followed the child down from the sick chamber
and stood gravely by, lending his ear to
her distress. He might have thought so,
though he was by no means imaginative, for
he had facts in his head that could have,
by themselves, suggested such a notion.
"Lanna!" said Steward Dank, as quietly as
though he was but calling her to dinner.
"Lanna!" She heard nothing. "Your
father asks for you." She rose at once, with
a fierce shudder, and Mr. Dank led her
indoors by the hand.

Burgomaster Tixel was the richest and
most friendless man in Amsterdam. He loved
only two things, his money, and his daughter,
and he loved both in a wretched, comfortless
and miserably jealous way. He was ignorant
and superstitious, as most people were in his
time—two or three centuries ago. If he could
live to-day, and act as he used to act, he
would be very properly confined in Bedlam.

He lay very near death in a large room,
gloomy with the shadows of evening and
hung with heavy tapestries. Mr. Dank led
Lanna to his side. "You will conquer your
fear, darling," said the Burgomaster, with a
rattle in his harsh voice. "If you have loved
me I prepare for you a pleasure. If you
have not loved me, if my memory is never to
be dear to you—be punished."

"O father!"

''You are too young to think—but twelve
years old—it is my place to think for you, and
Dank will care for you when I am gone,
because, dear, it is made his interest to do so.
When you know the worth of your inheritance
you will not speak as you have spoken. You
are a child. What do you know?"

"She knows," said Mr. Dank, in a dry
matter-of-fact way, "the value of a father's
blessing."

"True," said the Burgomaster, glaring at
the child; the signal lights of the great rock
of death on which he was fast breaking to
pieces, glittered in his eyes. " rue, Lanna.
Your obedience is the price of my last
blessing."

"I will obey you," she said, and he blessed
her. Then the little girl fell in a great agony
of fear over his hand crying, "O father, I
should like to die with you!"

"That is well, darling," said the
Burgomaster. "Those are tender words."

He made her nestle on the bed beside him
and then put an arm about her: pressing her
against his breast. "Now," said he, "let the
priests come in!" and the last rites of the
Church were celebrated over the Burgomaster,
while his little daughter remained
thus imprisoned. And the dead arm of the
Burgomaster, when his miserly and miserable
soul was fled, still pressed the little girl to
his dead heart.

Eight years after the death in Amsterdam
of Burgomaster Tixel, there was born at
Blickford, in Devonshire, the first and last
child of Hodge Noddison, a tiller of the soil,
with a large body, a hard hand, and a heart
to match it. He was not naturally a bad
fellow, but he was intensely stupid (as
hand-labourers in those days usually were) for want