inst., at Richmond, Surrey, Isabelle, wife of Roger Dyneley, had been safely delivered of a son and heir." Mortimer is, as he might well be, strangely moved at the news. Again (on poem-publishing thoughts intent) he visits London, leaving his wife at Havre. While he is away a daughter is born to him, but is born dead. A few days earlier, in the same innthanks to the long arm of circumstance and the machinations of the Clever but Unscrupulous one, another infant had been born. Marian agrees to pass off this one as her own and accepts the friendly offices of its mother as nurse. Mortimer hurries homewards on hearing the news of his child's birth and finds his wife taking but the most listless interest in her (supposed) child. She takes still less interest when she finds that the infant does not influence the father to the desired extent of making him accept reconciliation with his rich relative. Sick at heart with jealousy of her husband's earlier love and at her own ignoble duplicity, she runs away. Mortimer then goes with his (supposed) infant and a faithful servant to Italy.

In the course of nature, but none too hurriedly, the Sexagenarian, who has “repaid the

simple purity of the angel with the complex hate of the fiend," dies. A couple of years later Mortimer Dyneley sends his supposed, but by him for certain reasons called adopted, daughter to England to the care of the widowed Isabelle. Seven years later again he returns and finds the Richmond menage consisting of the widow Isabelle (still the loyal lover) her son Walter, his own supposed but said to be adopted daughter Florence, and her companion, a Mrs Landon. Walter and Florence have become lovers. In a near-by cottage -of which we have already heard-there lies dying a woman who proves to be the other mother of the Havre inn. She is being assiduously attended by Mrs Landon. Then come the surprises and the sorting out of these very mixed folk. The dying woman proves to be not only the mother of Florence, but also the wife of the Clever but Unscrupulous one, who has incidentally been attempting to blackmail Isabelle owing to his knowledge of her son's paternity. Isabelle has believed Mortimer's tale of his "adopted" daughter, knowing nothing of his having taken her advice and married, and thinks that he has returned after a long

interval to marry her, and lo! Mrs Landon turns out to be no other than Marian his wife! We take leave of them travelling on the Continent.

The title of the "three-decker " is "An Artist's Proof." It was published in 1864, and its author is Mr Alfred Austin, the present Poet-Laureate of England!

"THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

THE scene is the New Cut, a few yards from where it turns out of the Westminster Bridge Road. We are standing at a regulation costermonger's barrow, laden with a great variety, to outward seeming, of literary wares. Behind us

is the

-we are standing on the kerbstone gorgeous display of a cheap greengrocery store (rich in other fruit than that of the tree of knowledge so unappetisingly set before us), the air is heavy with the nauseating smell from a near-by cook-shop, of which the windows, steam-clouded from within, bear, in bold type, this simple legend: "What are the wild waves saying? Come and get a good dinner for sixpence !"

The end of the barrow by which we are standing is piled high with odd numbers of the London Journal, the Family Herald, the London Reader, and various novelettes, the whole gathered together under one comprehensive

label as sellable at "Five for a penny." We will not devote five seconds to these. The first of the other two sections into which the barrow is divided is filled with a higgledypiggledy collection of sermons, schoolbooks, hymns, and odd volumes to be sold at 3d. and 4d. each. 'Tis from just such an odd lot of literary winnowings that we may now and again gather up by lucky chance some precious ears of wheat. But no; we turn them over, one after another, with a practised hand, and scan their titles with as practised an eye-here are Doddridge's "Sermons," Watt's "Hymns, "Ancient and Modern" ditto, "Cornelius Nepos," Colenso's "Algebra," a ragged "Index to the Spectator, Tatler, and other Essayists," an odd volume of the "Sermons" of Mr Yorick, one or two much-bescribbled Clarendon Press plays of Shakespeare-just, in fact, the usual miscellany which experience has taught us is generally to be found at such a stall. We pass to the next section, distinguished by a considerable advance in the price of its contents for a roughly-written board, which had at one time done duty as part of the cover of a quarto Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," is marked with