would only be gainers by the eleven or twelve pounds which was the value of that fatal parcel.

Casting my eye round the room again, I spied in a corner a small cupboard which I had not before noticed. Instantly I was down on my knees ransacking it. All sorts of odds and ends were there. Several things puzzled me. What could be the meaning of those strong handkerchiefs, tied in the middle in such huge firm knots? Three or four pairs of steel handcuffs were equally inexplicable. At last I came to a long roll of something, in material and stoutness like strong corsage. What was this? Straps! Buckles! Merciful powers! It was a straight waistcoat! I groaned aloud. I knew where I was now.

The discovery, though, roused me to instant exertion. I dragged the heavy table to the foot of one of the windows. Upon the table I piled two or three of the dingy chairs, and then, at the infinite risk of my neck, climbed to the top. Quick as thought I dashed my already bruised hands through the glass, and gave one loud prolonged cry for help. Help!

I had no time for another effort. The noise made in dragging the furniture about must have roused the wretches below, for the door burst open, and in rushed two men in black. By them I was dragged to the ground, thrown down, bound, and speedily enlightened as to the use of the knotted handkerchiefs by being gagged till I was nearly choked. Then I fainted.

I was restored to consciousness by some one dashing water in my face. Gradually I became aware of several dark figures, gruff voices, flashing lanterns-the police!

"I tell you he aint no more mad than you are. I brought him here myself. It's Mr. of -Street,

That rough hoarse voice was sweeter then than the divinest strains of Patti or Nillson. It was the cabman. By him my cry had been heard as he was returning late in the evening to his stables.

I am happy to say that the two men in black became shortly after two men in gray, that being the colour of the uniform at one of our most noted convict prisons. Their employer, the proprietor of the illegal private lunatic asylum, shared their fate. I had also the satisfaction of knowing that my successful alarm caused the mysterious rooms with the whitened windows to give up their secrets.

As for my two lady customers, whether they were in collusion with the madhouse people or not, I cannot tell. I never saw either of them again-or my goods either. They had disappeared, after discharging the cabman, no one knew whither. As for me, whenever a sudden shiver passes through my frame, my family and friends ask no questions. They know that I am thinking of the house in St. John's Wood.

ABOUT Seventy years ago, when you and I, reader, were nonexistent,—when London was neither so populous nor so morbid after sensation as it is to-day,-when the lives of men and women were taken for the pettiest crimes, and people's hearts grew callous from the repetition of scenes which, thank God, we cannot see now even at the execution of the darkest criminal; at that time, then, in the December of the year 1799, there broke upon the City of London a story of love and murder and revenge so horrible, yet so thrilling, that men recoiled while they listened, and listened while they recoiled.

Six years before this chronicle of wild love and wilder vengeance struggled to the light, in the autumn of 1793, an old man, accompanied by a young girl, came to reside near the then isolated village of Rawdon, in Lincolnshire. Their residence was a detached three-storied building, with a wilderness of a garden at the back, and a strip of waste land in the front, divided from the coach-road by a stout stone wall.

The house has long since been pulled down, and a larger, as well as more modern one erected on its site, while a well drained and well planted park now stands where, seventy years ago, gorse, stonewort, and fen weeds flourished in the dank soil.

In those days drainage was not the science it is to-day; but still, when the last occupant of Moor Lodge, as it was called, who was farm bailiff of the estate, died of a low marsh fever, the landlord found it hard to find another tenant. The new farm bailiff refused to reside in it, and the place had stood empty for two years when one day an unexpected tenant arrived by the London coach, a thin wizened old man, who gave the name of Walters, and stifled the land-steward's inquiries by paying half a year's rent in advance.

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He was a poor man, he said, with whom things had gone badly, and after struggling against fortune all his life, he had come down there to end his days in peace on a little annuity left him by a friend-a very old friend-who had often lent him a hand when times went bad with him.

So much of a history which events proved to be purely imaginary, Walters vouchsafed to the steward, from whom he had higgled out a good bargain of the Lodge, after (which, with the keys of his new possession in his pocket, he went back to London by the night coach.

For three weeks nothing more was heard of him. At the end of that time a man passing early to his work saw the shutters of Moor Lodge open, and a thin spire of smoke issuing from one of its chimneys. Walters had come to his home in the night noiselessly and secretly, huddled together on a carrier's waggon alongside his rickety furniture. He had stolen into his own house like a thief, bringing with him his niece, a young girl whose existence formed no part of the history he volunteered to the land steward.

The man was a little wizened old man, apparently past the allotted age of humanity, an old man with furtive eyes and an humble, cringing manner, while the girl-as if in contrast to her miserable companion-was as straight as a young poplar. Straight and tall, and slim, with white, sloping shoulders, and a round, lithe waist. A handsome girl, too, with luminous dark eyes set under a low pale forehead, whose black arched eyebrows met over her small delicate nose. Eyes set in a dead white face, as white as the leaves of a white rose-a face of a pure, perfect oval, at whose exquisite contour men turned to look more in wonder than in admiration.

She was very handsome then, in the zenith of her life; yet about her beauty there hung none of the essence or perfume of youth,-none of its springy gladness lighted up eye or lip. Her face was innocent of rippling smiles or laughing glances. But still her beauty was precious in her eyes, not because it was pleasant to be beautiful, not because men stared at her as they went by, but rather because she held it as a talisman to lure and a talisman to keep the love of one man who was all in all to her,— a love which was to be at once her glory and crown, her madness and her ruin.

The Rawdon people wondered when they saw her what made a girl voluntarily adopt such a mode of life as this girl had chosen for herself. If she was poor she had hands with which to earn her bread,-hands which, in the eyes of those humble Lincolnshire labourers, were so much more valuable than heads. But, in spite