I was not reading a word; but merely counting how many letters there were in a page. As I looked into the fire, forms of picturesque beauty and wild distortion met my view; and, amidst a crowd of images formed by the bright cinders, I discerned the figure of Mirabel -the very likeness of Charles Kemble in former days -smiling amidst the horrid tortures of suspense, and masking agony with easy politeness, as the cut-throats crowded about him. I saw the whole scene beautifully acted in fire, and felt it in my brain.

Removing

"Time dragged wearily and painfully. from my finger a small piece of skin, I cut the flesh away with it, almost unwarned by any sensation of pain. I pared my finger-nails, for the sake of doing something, no matter what, to the very quick, and the blood started all round the tips. And then I flew to the window where all was dark, not to look out now, but to listen to footsteps.

"An interval of calm, however, there was. I reasoned in favour of the remaining time. Time there yet was for the restoration of the packet, and the security of those dear to me. Yes, I again persuaded myself that there was hope, high hope; the compact had not been violated; and dark as the long day had been, the midnight might yet look golden as a summer's noon.

"Silence followed, and the semblance of repose; but after some time the hush became absolutely intolerable, and feebly breaking through it, I could plainly hear the low ticking of the clock at a distance below stairs, which I had never heard before. It disturbed me. Had it been loud, sharp, it might have been unnoticed or easily borne; but it distressed me by its deadness and monctony. It was a sound of ill-omen, and announced momently that my hopes were perishing. Every tick seemed to tell me that my life-blood was oozing away

drop by drop at a time-one drop for each audible tick. I could bear it no longer.

“There was a crash of glass-how I caused it—and with what-I hardly know; but the act, the sound, was a welcome and indispensable relief. The next volley of discords, if less startling, was even more stunning than the first. The new crash came from the piano, all the powers of which I pressed into the service with a kind of frantic and yet solemn glee, to drown the dull, small ticking that had almost driven me mad.

Utterly unconscious of anything save the noises thus created, and the impossibility of hearing all other sounds still more intolerable, I continued this experiment, it might be for a minute, or for an hour, or for a day. I had lost all power to reckon time. When just as the insane dashing and crashing of all the discords into one extraordinary combination had attained its height, the door was opened—though I heard no sound at all.

"The loud double knock below had been unheard; the clatter of the maiden-messenger rushing up the stairs had been unheard; nay, her shrill exclamation beneficently set up within a few inches of my ear,

"Sir, here's the packet!'—

"Even this had been entirely unheard for the exact period of two seconds; but ere the third second had fled, I could have clasped her to my heart, or trebled her wages, to atone for my neglect and insensibility.

"Oh, packet invaluable! My lost treasure restored! How soon after that Long Day my heart grew young again, though my head has been twenty years older—I mean the gray outside of it-ever since!"

These Long Days, which are the common lot, custom (the sure and silent alleviator of every ill that is inevitable and must be borne) so far shortens, as by slow degrees to adapt the burden to the power of endurance.

The heavy task of yesterday seems lighter to-day; distance lessens when the eye, grown familiar with it, learns to measure its extent; we find the two-mile walk to our own dwelling, stretched into three or four when we are travelling on an unknown road to the house of the stranger.

The long, dull, weary day of factory-labour, restless, vigilant, and incessant, gathers, nevertheless, with a less grievous weight, hour by hour, upon the overtasked heart, than would the slow and lengthening minutes of the morrow, if on that sunless day the father saw his children, spared from grinding toil, pining with hunger. The day devoted to watchful tending by the bed of pain, when the being we most deeply revere is helpless, prostrate, and in peril—wears out less darkly than the fixed and hopeless monotony of the after-day, when such tending is needed no more. Short and merry is the long sad time, from early morn to noon, from eve into deep midnight, passed on the becalmed sea by the impatient heart-sick mariner, compared with that one day—that new, long, marvellous lifetime, sweet, and yet most horrible to bear-when the sunrise sees him sole survivor of the wreck, and the sunset leaves him hanging to a wave-washed point, or floating on a spar, alone and in the dark between sea and sky.

"FAULTS ON BOTH SIDES:"

THE OLD STORY.

"FAULTS on both sides" is a verdict delivered sixty million times in every second, from the jury-box of society.

As Everybody in these days can see occasion, and that

pretty frequently, to cast grave censure and cutting ridicule upon the classes from which juries are selected, it might reasonably be supposed that juries are not chosen from the classes to which Everybody belongs. It happens, however, that law and justice, when in quest of jurymen, are obliged to go for them to that multitudinous person, the public in general; and it follows, therefore, that people who lash or laugh at juries, are the severest self-censurers, and bitter satirists at their own cost. So with ourselves, and so be it.

Certain it is, that at this instant, in the honest city we reside in, juries are, to say the least, as unpopular as at Botany Bay; and this unpopularity as regularly increases as population does in the penal settlements. We who have unsullied characters, who abjure every vice that is unlawful, and who live in the practice of every virtue that is agreeable to our constitutions, all under the protection of the jury-box, rail as loudly at juries, as the rascals of whom juries rid us.

But then how nicely we discriminate with what a fine and delicate hand we draw the line between (as we may say) the box and its twelve tenants. How philosophically we distinguish between the jury and the juryism, between the practice and the principle. While we bully the "honest and intelligent" dozen as often as we please; how rapturously we, on every occasion, extol the system. The blockheads assembled in the box are only not knaves and perjurers, because they are dense fools, or dreamers past waking; but the box itself is all the while religiously held to be a blessing invaluable.

An Englishman may just as well poison his grandmother, as rail at trial by jury. No false indictment was ever torn to pieces in the face of the world, under a jury's unerring and beneficent auspices, as that free

born Briton would be who should dare to whisper in any popular assembly a syllable disparaging to that glorious institution. To hint that it is less than perfect, is to incur moral expatriation: the blackest criminals would cut you when you went up to give evidence in their favour. Indeed, the very worst offenders have been known to declare that if they could not be tried by a jury of their country, they would rather not be tried at all.

Yet it must be admitted that there is an argument which ought, and, but for an apparently instinctive prejudice in favour of trial by jury, must prevail, especially among the class last adverted to. Since, if the strict and faultless rule of justice is understood to assert, that a man can only be truly tried when he is tried by his peers, it follows that a prisoner who has once been convicted, should, when arraigned a second time, be tried by a jury of convicts. Every man is deemed innocent until proved guilty; bright, unwritten maxim making written laws look oftentimes dark; hence twelve honest men to try the accused. But when the prisoner at the bar happens to be an unfortunate who has once before been found guilty of robbery, ought there not-in fairness-to be twelve thieves in the jurybox to try him?

It speaks volumes (large and numerous as the statutes themselves), for the love and veneration in which trial by jury is held by all classes of our countrymen, that the advocacy of such a principle of impartiality as this might be just as securely ventured upon in either house of legislature, as in a meeting of the swell-mob, however "numerous and influential." The very prisoners would kick the asserter of such a privilege out of Newgate. Picking oakum constitutes no paradise, would be their natural exclamation as human beings; but, as English