To the very limits of satiety;
But his heart sought dull, material ways,
And straggled to church for mere variety."

A fourth: " I sing in sounding verse
Of a genius underneath me sleeping:
I praise his writings, full, yet terse;
But my words are with the rest in keeping.
His wits lay under a sluggish curse,
And their crops were never worth the reaping.'

Thus, in the gathering shades of night,
And tinder the vapours cold and crawling,
Those gibing spirits, to left and right,
Our human vanity kept galling:
Uttering scorn in pride's despite,
In a way half-ludicrous, half-appalling.

I left the place with heavy heart,
And I sought the town in the lighted distance.
I needed the forms of life and art
To meet those ghosts with strong resistance.
But soon my gloom and the mists depart
By a sudden north wind's bleak assistance.

Our human hearts (I said) are wrought
Of good and ill in a subtle tangle:
They err who count the good as naught,
And with redeeming angels wrangle:
We still hear God's harmonious thought,
However the earthly discords jangle.

I doubt not many a spotted life
Slept in that graveyard's black embracement;
But some kept up a golden strife
With the dark: a dusky-bright enlacement.
Their souls, with quenchless ardour rife,
Lifted themselves from their own abasement.

THE POISONED MEAL.

IN FIVE CHAPTERS.
CHAPTER THE THIRD. THE EVIDENCE.

WE have followed Marie to the cell door.
She has been illegally arrested by a stratagem;
she has been illegally imprisoned as
condemned felons are imprisoned; she has
not been heard in her own defence; and she
has never been confronted with her accusers.
Thus far, the case is one of suspicion only.
Waiting until the end of the trial before we
decide on whom that suspicion ought to rest,
let us now hear the evidence by which the
Duparcs and their adherents proceeded to
justify their conspiracy against the liberty
and the life of a friendless girl.

Having secured Marie in solitary confinement,
and having thus left the house and all
that it contained for a whole night at the
free disposal of the Duparcs, the Procurator
Revel bethought himself, the morning after
the arrest of his prisoner, of the necessity of
proceeding with something like official regularity.
He accordingly issued his requisition
to the Lieutenant-Criminel to accompany
him to the house of Monsieur Duparc,
attended by the medical officers and the
clerk, to inquire into the circumstances under
which the suspected death by poisoning of
Monsieur de Beaulieu had taken place.
Marie had been imprisoned on the evening
of the seventh of August, and this requisition
is dated on the morning of the eighth. The
document betrays one remarkable informality.
It mentions the death of Monsieur de Beaulieu;
but is absolutely silent on the subject
of the alleged poisoning of seven persons at
dinner the next day. And yet, it was this
latter circumstance only which first directed
suspicion against Marie, and which induced
Lawyer Friley to lodge the information against
her on which the Procurator was now acting.
Probably Monsieur Revel's legal acumen
convinced him, at the outset, that the story
of the poisoned dinner was too weak to be
relied on.

The officers of the law, accompanied by the
doctors, proceeded to the house of the Duparcs
on the eighth of August. After viewing
the body of Monsieur de Beaulieu, the
medical men were directed to open and
examine it. They reported the discovery in
the stomach of a reddish, brick-coloured liquid,
somewhat resembling the lees of wine. The
mucous membrane was detached in some
places, and its internal surface was corroded.
On examining the reddish liquid, they found it
to contain a crystallised sediment, which, on
analysation, proved to be arsenic. Upon
this, the doctors delivered it as their opinion
that Monsieur de Beaulieu had been poisoned,
and that poison had been the cause of his
death.

The event having taken this serious turn,
the first duty of the Lieutenant-Criminel
(according to the French law) was to send
for the servant on whom suspicion rested, to
question her, and to confront her with the
Duparcs. He did nothing of the kind; he
made no inquiry after the servant (being
probably unwilling to expose his colleague,
the Procurator, who had illegally arrested
and illegally imprisoned her); he never examined
the kitchen utensils which the Commissary
had locked up; he never opened the
servant's cupboard with the key that had
been taken from her when she was searched
in prison. All he did was to reduce the
report of the doctors to writing, and to return
to his office with his posse-comitatus at his
heels.

It was next necessary to summon the
witnesses and examine them. But the
Procurator Revel now conveniently remembered
the story of the poisoned dinner, and he sent
the Lieutenant-Criminel to examine the
Duparcs and their friends at the private
residence of the family, in consideration of
the sickly condition of the eaters of the
adulterated meal. It may be as well to observe,
here as elsewhere, that these highly-
indulged personages had none of them been
sufficiently inconvenienced even to go to
bed, or in any way to alter their ordinary
habits.

On the afternoon of the eighth, the Lieutenant-
Criminel betook himself to the house
of Monsieur Duparc, to collect evidence