OLD HAUNTS BY M. F. TUPPER. I LOVE to linger on my track In after years to loiter back, My foot falls lightly on the sward, Old places have a charm for me Their kindly looks again! Is changeable as air, I'll anchor in the solid ground And root my memories there' THE BLUE EYES. BY CAMILLA TOULMIN. CHAPTER FIRST. "I AM very late, dear Fanny, but I have twenty things to tell you of, which have detained me to-day," said Walter Bingham to his wife, as she met him in the hall with a smiling face and affectionate welcome. Their house was a small one, in an obscure and fourth-rate street; but love and peace were the guardian angels that kept the portal, and shed a fairy lustre throughout the dwelling. 66 Nay," replied the wife, "you said that I must not expect you before five, but that you would not be later than six; it has not struck, so I am sure I have no right to complain.” Ah, Fan, you never scold- but you know very well I meant to be home long ago," Walter Bingham's history may be briefly told. He had been left an orphan when a mere child, and confided by his father's will to the guardianship of his maternal uncle, the child's nearest relative. Mr. Shirley was a thoroughly worldly man. It would have been a compliment to call him " a man of the world," seeing that this phrase, ugly as it is in its most general meaning, nevertheless implies a width a grasp of mind Walter's uncle never possessed; but he was intensely worldly and selfish in all his aims, narrow as they were, without a sympathy beyond his own hearth, from which indeed in this sense the orphan was excluded. Fortunately, Walter's fortune, amounting to about six thousand pounds, had been so tightly secured in the hands of trustees, that, beyond receiving the appointed allowance for his education, even Mr. Shirley's ingenuity could not make away with it during the boy's minority; but he was not without his plans by which to appropriate it nevertheless. On one dexterous pretext or another he avoided settling Walter in any profession or pursuit until he became of age; taking care meanwhile to make his life glide away so smoothly, that delays and changes of purpose seemed to have arisen from the most fortunate course of events. His scheme, however, was to make Walter's inheritance the nucleus of a fortune for his own son Charles, a shrewd youth, who added to his father's characteristics a keener intellect, and, if possible, a colder heart. In due time, therefore, a mercantile project was brought forward, and in a few weeks a partnership was formed between the cousins. Charles Shirley was at this time seven or eight and twenty: it was represented that his experience and circumstances had given him a knowledge of business-should be weighed against Walter's money, and they started on terms of perfect equality. ` A thriving business, however, once established, the "experienced" partner had no notion of another reaping the fruits of his toil. By turns appalling his dupe - for that is the proper term - by the proposal of daring and unprincipled speculations, and impressing him with a sense of his own unfitness to cope with anxieties so great, or decide on undertakings so important, in less than six years he contrived to dissolve their partnership - leaving Walter, it is true, but a wreck of his property, and yet gaining his end without any violent rupture or wordy quarrel. The cousins were as opposite as light from darkness. Walter Bingham's was a nature that would not swerve aside from the path of strict integrity for all the temptations of gain which could be offered him. His own high heart had saved him from many of the evils of an imperfect and even corrupt education; but his character had developed rather late, and all which was valuable he had learned since he became his own master, and not a few of his early lessons had he unlearned during the same period. He was now a great deal too self-reliant to be made the dupe of any one. He had married, too, and wedded with a gentle, loving woman, whose finely tempered mind responded to all his own highest principles and noblest aspirations. Both were devoid of vulgar ambition, both tested things by their reality and not by their seeming; and, as is ever the case in such unions, each felt from this mutual support firmer of heart for all high purposes than they could have been separately. One or two plans for realizing an income without dipping into his diminished capital had been adopted by Walter Bingham, and two or three years had passed in these experiments without any very flattering degree of success; and by the autumn day on which they are introduced to the reader, the young couple were seriously thinking of emigrating to Australia. All in all to each other, there was no tie in England to make the step a painful one; and they knew that under any sky their own hearts could make home. Their simple dinner was soon over, and meanwhile Fanny learned how her husband had been disappointed of seeing one man of business, and had had to wait half an hour for another, and how a stoppage of vehicles in one of the narrow great thoroughfares had impeded the cab he had taken to save time, with half a dozen disasters fully sufficient to account for his coming home |