nion-" when my noble-minded friend has once set her heart upon any liberal or beneficent action her obstinacy is inconceivable. This is her besetting sin; she is sadly stubborn and intractable-so I often tell her, for frankness is my motto-I am quite a plain-spoken body, and never scruple to remind her of her faults. Not that I object to her conduct in the present instance-quite the reverse, and I have only mentioned her failing that you may cease any fruitless opposition to her wishes."

Walter would still have hesitated, but finding himself unable to resist the cordial and urgent manner in which the proffered accommodation was pressed upon his acceptance; and feeling assured that his father would quickly enable him to repay it, he at length took from the purse a sufficient sum to purchase another horse, making at the same time the most fervent acknowledgments for the favour, and declaring that he should never forget the kindness evinced by a stranger who had first become acquainted with him under circumstances

so little calculated to entitle him to her kind

ness.

"And whenever you hear a long-eared animal braying by the road-side, I hope you won't forget the Worshipful Balaam Hickman, Mayor of Westbury," cried Catherine. "Tush! tush! no more of acknowledgments!—I hate them!" She pursued the conversation for some little time in the same bantering and jocose strain, which she maintained with unabated smartness and vivacity, occasionally interrupted by her friend's exclamations of amazement at her high spirits and prodigious conversational powers, when she suddenly started up, declaring that she must immediately renew her journey. Walter bade both the ladies adieu, pledged himself to call upon them as soon as he should arrive in London, and after having mused for some time upon the strange nature of his adventure, the generosity of the lively Catherine, and the probable motives that could impel a being apparently so volatile to such a strict concealment

of her name and quality, he walked to a dealer's in the town to purchase a horse, in order that he might follow his fair friends, and clear up the mystery with as little delay as possible.

CHAPTER VII.

To move, to raise, to ravish every heart,
With Shakspeare's nature, or with Jonson's art,
Let others aim;-'tis yours to raise the soul
With thunder rumbling from the mustard bowl.
While horns and trumpets now to madness swell,
Now sink in sorrows with a tolling bell.

РОРЕ.

OUR traveller, whose thoughts were almost exclusively occupied during the remainder of his journey by his strange adventure at Westbury, arrived in London without having encountered any fresh mischance, and not a little anxious to redeem his pledge by calling upon his anonymous friends in Pall Mall. In the first instance, he betook himself to a sufficiently humble lodging in Holborn, kept by an old maid-servant of his family who had married and

settled in this quarter, and had been prepared to receive him by a letter from his provident mother. On taking possession of his apartments, however, and examining the state of his finances, a fresh dilemma awaited him, for as the managing Mrs. Colyton had persuaded him not to bear about his person much more than was sufficient, upon her own economical calculations, to carry him to London; and as mothers and sons seldom arrive at the same arithmetical conclusion in their estimate of travelling expenses, he found that the surplus she had anticipated was reduced to little more than a single guinea. This embarrassing discovery occasioned him to regret more than ever the loss of the saddle and its contents, especially as, in the contemplation of a new military outfit in London, he had brought with him no more than a single suit of clothes, which not only betrayed evidence of service and travel, but were too rustic in fashion, and too homely in material, to be worn in visits of ceremony at a time when the gentility, or at least the gentle