heard by the landlady proceeding from the room in which the interview took place, but she paid no special attention to it until she was suddenly startled by the report of two pistol shots fired in rapid succession. Calling to her husband for assistance, he and another man entered the room, when a shocking spectacle presented itself. The visitor lay stretched on his face near the door quite dead. By his side lay a revolver, one barrel of which had evidently just been discharged. Lying back in an arm-chair, with his face buried in his hands, at the other end of the room, was Mr. Vaughan, and near him on the table was another revolver, which inspection showed also to have had one barrel recently discharged. At first it was supposed that Mr. Vaughan was wounded, but this proved happily not to be the case. He was, however, so unnerved that he could give no coherent account of the transaction, but kept repeating over and over again, 'I had to do it! I had to do it!' Directly the serious nature of the case was realised, a doctor was called in and the police were sent for. However, as already intimated, the injured man was beyond the reach of medical aid. As Mr. Vaughan could give no connected account of the affair, he was arrested and taken in a cab to the police station on a charge of manslaughter. Hardly had he been removed, however, before a discovery was made which tended to throw some light on the affair, and to point to the conclusion that, in what he had done, Mr. Vaughan had probably only acted in self-defence. It seems that the detective called in to investigate the case at once recognised the dead man as a notorious criminal named Dredster Rawdon, against whom some years ago a warrant was out for the murder and robbery of his uncle, a gentleman of property in Lincolnshire, and who since then has led the life of a cattle stealer and outlaw in some of the wilder parts of America. On his return to England a few months ago the authorities contemplated his arrest, but were deterred by the fact that the principal witnesses who could have proved the murder of his uncle are all dead. What precise motive he had in visiting Mr. Vaughan it is impossible to say with certainty, but probably robbery. It seems pretty clear from a consideration of all the facts that the unhappy man must have drawn his revolver from his pocket and discharged it at Mr. Vaughan, but missed his aim, and that then Mr. Vaughan, in self-defence, shot him before he could discharge a second barrel. Mr. Vaughan will be brought up at Marlborough Street this morning, when, if not discharged, he will doubtless be admitted to bail pending the result of the coroner's inquest."

Such was the account I read with feelings of horror. How

strange it all seemed. Poor Vaughan had certainly the stain of blood upon him now, however justifiably he might have acted. What a tangled web this life of ours is!

I would have gone to him at once, had it been possible. But I was inextricably tied by my professional duties. As soon as I could get out in the afternoon, I went straight to the police station. He had been already released on bail. I hurried to his rooms. He had just started for his home in the country. I tried to glean a few more particulars from the landlord and his wife, but all they knew had already appeared in print.

I wrote to Vaughan that evening, expressing my sincere sympathy with him in this unexpected trial, and asking if I could be of any service. But again I received no answer. So I could only wait for what might happen next.

A day or two later the coroner's jury returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. At this inquiry Vaughan was unable to be present owing to illness, but he was represented by counsel, who clearly showed that everything tended to prove that his client had acted merely in self-defence. A little later Vaughan surrendered to his bail at the police-court, and was at once discharged, the magistrate remarking that he seemed to have acted as any man of courage would have acted in the circumstances, and that he deserved the sympathy of the public as regarded the melancholy result.

Again, I did not succeed in seeing Vaughan, but about a week later I received from him a letter as nearly as possible to the following effect. It did not begin, as his letters to me usually did, "My dear Lovart." Nor did it end with any phrase of affection, or even with his signature. Without date and without address, it ran thus :

"You at least have a right to know the truth. For the sake of my family, for the sake of my sensitive self, I shrank from revealing it to others, and simply remained silent. But, as a matter of fact, I murdered that man. He came to me coarsely boasting of his former dalliance with Alma, and taunting me with sharing his nature and his blood. This maddened me. I have carried a revolver ever since I discovered what had been done to me at the hospital. I foresaw that I might find life too hard to bear-that I might have to kill myself to save myself. Would that I had done so before this wretch visited me the second time. I had the revolver on the table before me as he thus tortured me. It caught my eye-it was loaded -I knew it. A sudden impulse seized me-a something not myself -the same something that made me write that foul poem. I knew not what I did, but I heard a report, and I saw the monster fall

forward on the floor. As he fell, his revolver (I fancy he always carried one) must have dropped from his pocket, and, falling on the floor, have gone off of itself. But mine was the first shot, his the second. I fired at him, he never fired at me. There was no selfdefence. I was in no danger. I did it because it was in my blood to do it. And now I forgive you, but never write to me again. My life is over. I could not ask Alma to become the wife of a murderer. Farewell!"

This appalling letter quite unnerved me. What could I say or do? I was forbidden to write, and I felt that no arguments I could use would have the least effect upon Vaughan in the face of the fact he now disclosed. And yet it was as clear to me as ever that it was all the result of a morbid mental impression. A dominant idea nursed and brooded over had wrought him up to this unhappy climax. I was miserable for my friend, but I could take no blame to myself. I had done the best I could for him; and had not a villain taken advantage of his sensitive temperament, and he himself indulged a wild imagination, all would have been well.

I destroyed his letter, and have quoted it from memory, where it stands out with painful clearness to this day. Then, knowing that it would be useless to write to him, I wrote to his mother, asking for some information respecting him, and giving her a hint as delicately as I could that it was possible he might harbour plans of suicide. In reply she told me that her son had broken off his engagement, and gone abroad. When a year later I wrote again, I was inexpressibly grieved, though hardly astonished, to learn that he was in a lunatic asylum. I paid a visit to the place, intending to see him, but was dissuaded by the Superintendent. "In the first place," he said, "it is hardly safe, as Mr. Vaughan has a strongly-developed homicidal mania. In the second place, the thought of his past life is very painful to him, and any thing or any person that reminds him of it makes him worse." After this I could not press my claim to see him, and in fact I never did see him again. He lingered a year or two, and then died without recovering his reason.

I have never heard what became of Alma.

The whole affair was of course extremely painful to me, and, absolutely blameless as I am in the matter, I have yet never cared to repeat the operation which turned out so unhappily for my poor friend.

23

THE

NOVELISTS' LAW.

HE notice in the recent life of " George Eliot " by her husband, J. W. Cross, of the impeachment in the Edinburgh Review and of the vindication in the Pall Mall Gazette, of the law on which the plot of "Felix Holt" hinges, suggests the general question of the goodness or badness of the law which other novelists have introduced into their works; and it may be not uninteresting to pass in review some of the tales of the writers who have imported legal questions into their fictions as an important part of the machinery of them.

The class that has so introduced good law, is, so far as I know-for I do not venture to criticise the Scottish law of the mighty master of fiction who was also Sheriff of Selkirkshire-the peculiar one described by logicians as consisting of a single individual. I refer, of course, to the accomplished lawyer and splendid novelist, whom the great Gibbon has designated as "our immortal Fielding."

In the story which narrates the fortunes of the faulty Captain Booth and of his faultless wife (who gives to the book as its title her name of "Amelia"), the author adduces and reprobates some instances of legal perversity which have been only too tardily corrected by the Legislature.

Betty, Mrs. Booth's maidservant, has stolen and pawned some shifts of her mistress, and she and the pawnbroker are brought before a magistrate. As the justice was going to speak he was interrupted by the girl, who, falling upon her knees to Booth, with many tears begged his forgiveness.

"Indeed, Betty," cries Booth, "you do not deserve forgiveness; for you know you had very good reasons why you should not have thought of robbing your mistress, particularly at this time. And what further aggravates your crime is that you have robbed the best and kindest mistress in the world. Nay, you are guilty not only of felony but of a felonious breach of trust, for you know very well everything your mistress had was entrusted to your care."

Now it happened, by very great accident, that the justice before whom this girl was brought understood the law. Turning, therefore,

to Booth he said: "Did you say, sir, that this girl was entrusted with the shifts?"

"Yes, sir," said Booth, "she was entrusted with everything."

"And will you swear that the goods stolen," said the justice, "are worth forty shillings?"

"No, indeed, sir!" answered Booth. "Nor that they are worth thirty either."

"Then, sir," cries the justice, "the girl cannot be guilty of felony."

'How, sir," said Booth, " is it not a breach of trust? And is not a breach of trust felony, and the worst felony, too?"

"No, sir," answered the justice, "a breach of trust is no crime in our law unless it be in a servant, and then the Act of Parliament requires the goods taken to be the value of forty shillings."

"So, then, a servant," cries Booth, "may rob his master of thirtynine shillings whenever he pleases, and he can't be punished?"

"If the goods are under his care he can't," cries the justice.

"I ask your pardon, sir," says Booth, "I do not doubt what you say, but sure this is very extraordinary law."

Perhaps I think so, too," said the justice; "but it belongs not to my office to make or to mend laws. My business is only to execute them. If, therefore, the case be as you say, I must discharge the girl."

"I hope, however, you will punish the pawnbroker," cries Booth. "If the girl is discharged," cries the justice, "so must be the pawnbroker, for, if the goods are not stolen he cannot be guilty of receiving them knowing them to be stolen. And, besides, as to his offence, to say the truth I am almost weary of prosecuting it, for such are the difficulties laid in the way in this prosecution, that it is almost impossible to convict anyone on it. And, to speak my opinion plainly, such are the laws, and such the method of proceeding, that one would almost think our laws were rather made for rogues than for the punishment of them.

"Thus ended this examination; the thief and the receiver went about their business, and Booth departed in order to go home to his wife."

Again the Booths are victims of a heartless robbery, but this time of property, which in the eye of the law possesses legal attributes more refined and subtle than those of shifts.

Mrs. Booth's sister, Miss Harris, has instigated the theft in pursuance of her design to deprive Mrs. Booth, by a forged will, of her share of their mother's fortune, the bulk of which had been left to Amelia by the true will.