may think fit to cram herself into my house! We've plenty of work on our hands without having to wait on other people's servants. What do you say, Sammy ?"

"Well, I don't know, meesis," replied Mr. Palethorpe; "it seems as if Mr. Rowel was understood to say he was very bad, and must be waited on pretty constantly."

"I'm sure I shan't wait on him neither constantly nor inconstantly!" very pertly exclaimed Miss Sowersoft; and, certainly giving a very ingenious turn to her own views, as soon as she found which way her lover's needle pointed; "I'm not going to trot up and down stairs a thousand times a day for the sake of such a thing as a plough-lad. Them may wait on him that likes him, if he is to be waited on; but I'm positive I shan't, nor anybody else that belongs to me!"

This conclusion left, without another word, the field wholly open to Fanny; and, as Miss Sowersoft, on concluding her speech, bounced off into the dairy, not another word was needed.

Whatever might be the views entertained by the lady of the house, touching the treatment most proper for Colin, there still were individuals amongst that rude community, whose feelings were of a somewhat more Catholic kind than those of their mistress; so that Fanny found no difficulty in procuring a volunteer in the person of Abel, to go over to Bramleigh for the purpose of informing Mistress Clink how affairs stood, and of bringing back such few needful articles as Fanny might require during her stay at the farm.

All that night she passed a sleepless watch by the side of Colin's bed, beguiling the hours not devoted to immediate attendance on him, partly by looking over the little books which had come from home in his box, but more by employing her mind in the creation of every possible description of fanciful suppositions touching her own origin, her history, her parents, and the knowledge which the doctor appeared to have of her earliest life. What was it?-what could it be? and, what could he mean by enjoining her to mention nothing of all this to any second person? In her he had unexpectedly found one whom he had known a baby, and had believed to be dead, or lost in the vast promiscuous crowds of poverty long ago. Had she been born to better things than surrounded her now? Had she been defrauded of her rights? And, did the doctor bid her be silent because he might have to employ stratagem in order to recover them again? Perhaps she was born-nay! she knew not what she was born; nor dare she trust herself to think, scarcely; though certain it is that a visionary world of ladies and gentlemen, and fine things, and wealth to set Colin up in the world and to make his mother comfortable, and to exalt herseif over all the petty enemies by whom they were now surrounded, passed in pleasant state before her prolific imagination; while, it is equally certain, that--blushing, though unseen and in secret, at the very

consciousness, a prouder feeling sprung up in her bosom, and she began to feel as though she must be more genteel, and more particular, and less like a common servant, than she had hitherto been.

Such were the golden fancies, and the pretty resolves, that crowded round her brain that night. Neither, as an honest chronicler of human nature, would I take upon me to assert that she did not once or twice during these reveries rise to contemplate her own features in the glass, and to adjust her hair more fancifully, and wonder if it should be so, -what kind of looking lady she would make. Truly, it was a pretty face that met her eyes in the mirror. As Colin woke up from a partial slumber, and raised his head slightly from the pillow, to see for his guardian, and to ascertain what had become of her, the reflection of her countenance as she was "looking the lady," chanced to catch his eye : and, though he smiled as he gently sunk down again, he thought that that face would never again pass from before him.

CHAPTER XV.

Fanny is deceived by the doctor.-A scene in Rowel's "Establishment for the Insane" at Nabbfield.

POOR girl! What pains she takes-if not to "curse herself," at least to form that paradise out of the chaos of her own thoughts, which her supposed benefactor, the physician, never intended to realize. She was deceived, utterly and deeply deceived; and deceived, too, by the very means which the doctor had recommended to her apparently for the attainment of success. For, great as some of our modern diplomatists have incontestably been considered in the noble and polite art of deception, I much question whether the man more capable of aspiring to higher honours in it than was Doctor Rowel of Nabbfield, is not yet to be born.

As the Doctor rode homewards, after his interview with Fanny, recorded in the preceding chapter, true enough it is that he did several times over, and with inexpressible inward satisfaction, congratulate and compliment himself upon having achieved such a really fine stroke of policy at a very critical moment, as no other man living could, he verily believed, have at all equalled. Within the space of a few brief moments he had, to his infinite astonishment, discovered, in the person of a serv ing-girl, one whom he himself had endeavoured, while she was yet an infant, to put out of the way; and upon whose father he had perpetrated one of the most atrocious of social crimes, for the sole purpose of obtaining the management of his property while he lived, and its absolute possession on his decease. He had ascertained that the girl retained some indistinct recollection of the forcible arrest and carrying away of her parent, of which he himself had been the instigator; and thus, suddenly he found himself placed in a position which demanded both

promptitude and ingenuity in order to secure his own safety and the permanency of all he held through this unjust tenure. Since any dis covery by Fanny of what had passed between them would inevitably excite public question and inquiry, the very brilliant idea had instantaneously suggested itself to his mind that-as in the girl's continued silence alone lay his own hopes of security,-no project in the capacity of man to conceive was more likely to prove successful in obtaining and preserving that silence, than that of representing it as vital to her own dearest interest to keep the subject deeply locked for the present in her own bosom. This object, he flattered himself, he had already succeeded in achieving, without exciting in the mind of Fanny herself the least suspicion of his real and ultimate purpose. At the same time he inwardly resolved not to stop here, but to resort to every means in his power calculated still more deeply to bind the unsuspecting young woman to the preservation of that silence upon the subject, which, if once broken, might lead to the utter overthrow of a system which he had now maintained for years.

Elated with the idea of his own uncommon cleverness, he cantered along the York road from the moor with corresponding briskness; turned down a green lane to the left; cleared several fences and a pair of gates in his progress; and reached within sight of his "Establishment for the Insane” at Nabbfield, as the last light of another unwished. for and unwelcome sun shot through the barred and grated windows of the house, and served dimly to show to the melancholy habitants of those cells the extent of their deprivations and their misery.

Far advanced as it was in the evening, the doctor had not yet dined: his professional duties, together with some other causes already explained, having detained him beyond his usual hour. Nevertheless, for reasons best known to himself, but which, it may be supposed, the events of the afternoon had operated in producing, the doctor had no sooner dismounted, and resigned his steed to the care of a groom, who appeared in waiting the instant that the clatter of his hoofs sounded on the stones of the yard, than, instead of retiring to that removed portion of the building, in which, for the purpose of being beyond the reach of the cries of those who were kept in confinement, his own private apartments were situated, he demanded of one of the keepers the key of a particular cell. Having obtained it,

"Shall I attend you, sir ?" asked the man.

"No, Robson. James is harmless. I will see him into his ceil myself to-night."

"He is in the patient's yard, sir," replied the keeper.

"Very well-very well. Wait outside; and, if I want assistance, I will call you."

The man retired, while Dr. Rowel proceeded down a long and illlighted passage, or corridor, in which were several angular turns and

windings; and when nearly lost in the gloom of the place, he might have been heard to draw back a heavy bolt, and raise a spring-latch like an iron bar, which made fast the door that opened upon the yard, or piece of ground to which the keeper had alluded.

It was just at that brief, but peculiar time, at the turn of day and night, which every observer of Nature must occasionally have remarked, when the light of the western atmosphere, and that of a rayless moon high up the southern heaven, mingle together in subdued har mony, and produce a kind of illumination, issuing from no given spot, but pervading equally the whole atmosphere,-like that which we might imagine of a Genii's palace,-without any particular source, neither wholly of heaven nor of earth, but partaking partially of each.

The passage-door was thrown back, and the doctor stood upon its threshold. A yard some forty feet square surrounded by a wall about six yards high, and floored with rolled gravel, like the path of a gar den, was before him. Near the centre stood a dismal-looking yewtree, its trunk rugged, and indented with deep natural furrows, as though four or five shoots had sprung up together, and at last become matted into one; its black lines of foliage, harmonizing in form with the long horizontal clouds of the north-west quarter, which now marked As the the close approach of night. Nothing else was to be seen. eye, however, became somewhat more accustomed to the peculiar dusky light which pervaded this place, the figure of a man standing against the tree-trunk, became visible; with his arms tightly crossed upon his breast, and bound behind him, as though they had almost grown into his sides; and his hair hanging long upon his shoulders, somewhat like that of a cavalier, or royalist, of the middle of the seventeenth century. The doctor raised his voice, and called, in a lusty tone,

"Woodruff!"

The patient returned no answer, nor did he move.

"James Woodruff !" again shouted the doctor.

A slight turn of the head, which as quickly resumed its previous attitude, was the only response made to the summons.

Finding he could not call this strange individual to him, Doctor Rowel stepped across the yard, and advanced up to him.

"James," said he mildly, "it is time you were in your cell."
The man looked sternly in his face, and replied,

"I have been there some thousands of times too often already.
"Never heed that," answered Rowel.

know."

"You must go to rest, you

"Must go-ay? Ah! and so I must. I am helpless. But, had I one hand free-only one hand - nay, with one finger and thumb, I would first put you to rest where you should never wake again! When am I to go free?"

"Will you go to your room?" said the doctor, without regarding his question.

66

"I ask again,” cried the alleged madman, "as I have asked every day past counting, when am I to be loosed of this accursed place? How long is this to last?"

"Only until you are better," remarked, with deep dissimulation, this worthy member of the faculty.

"Better !" exclaimed Woodruff, with rising passion, as he tugged to loosen his arms from the jacket which bound him, though as ineffectually as a child might have tugged at the roots of an oak sapling. "I could curse you again and doubly for that word, but that I have cursed till language is weak as water, and words have no more meaning. I am sick of railing. Better! Till I am better! Thief!-liar!villain!-for you are all these, and a thousand more,-I am well. You know it. Sound in mind and body,-only that these girths have crippled me before my time. How am I mad? I can think, reason, talk, argue,-hold memory of past life. I remember, villain ! when you and your assassins seized me; stole my child from me; swore that I was mad; and brought me here, now seventeen years ago; and all that you might rob me of my property !—I remember that. Is that madness? I remember, before that, that I married your sister. Was it not so? I remember that she died, and left me a little pattern of herself, that called you uncle. Was not that so? Where is that child? What has become of her ? Or are you a murderer besides ? All this I remember and I know now that I have power of will, and aptness to do all that man's mind is called to do. Oh! for one hand free! One hand and arm. that half chance to struggle with you. Let us end it so, if I am never to go free again. Take two to one; and if you kill me, you shall stand free of the scaffold; for I will swear with my last breath that you did it in self-defence. Do that. Let me have one grapple-a single gripe-and, if you can master me, why God forgive you !"

How, then, am I mad?
Only one! Give me

The doctor smiled, as in contempt of the impotent ravings and wild propositions of his brother-in-law; for such, it is almost needless to state, James Woodruff was. But the alleged maniac continued his dis.

course.

"Then, as you are such a rank, arrant coward, give me my whole liberty; let me go beyond this house, and I will never touch you. I will not ruffle a hair of your accursed head. Do that and I will leave you to God for the reward of all you have done to me and mine! Set me free! Untie my limbs, and let me out this night! It is dark. Nobody can tell where I came from. Let me go, and I will never mention your name in complaint, nor lift a hand against you. Think, man, -do but think! To spend seventeen years of nights in that dungeon, and seventeen years of days on this speck of ground! To who have been at liberty to walk, and breathe freely, and see God's crea

you