"Stand up, Tory, and look at me," said Humphrey.

I obeyed him. His face was anxious and overcast, and his eyes met mine with a keen and penetrating gaze. I stretched out my hand to him, and he grasped it in both of his.

"Don't let me be a selfish scoundrel, Tory," he said, in a tone of remonstrance; "don't let me take advantage of your impulsive nature. God knows, till Lavinia jilted me, I never thought of this; never felt what a void there would be in my life when my little Australian was gone back to her colony. But I found it out when I discovered that I was not unhappy at Lavinia's desertion. It is this simple, wild, untaught, unfettered little linnet that was nestling down in my heart, and making the music of home for me. I shall miss you every hour of the day; every time I cross my fields; every moment I spend alone in my library."

"I will not go," I murmured.

"My darling, you have made one mistake in your generous, impetuous youth. Remember, I am an old man compared to you; impoverished now; rejected, too, by the woman betrothed to me for years. Tory, be careful how you answer me."

"I don't like young men," I answered; and Mr. Grainger laughed at my earnestness, a laugh full of triumph and satisfaction; "and I hate being grand and formal and rich; and, oh, I shall enjoy Lavinia's knowing that she has not broken your heart. I shall make such a good farmer's wife; and you will love me all my life long."

The twilight, lingering as it was, had quite died away before we moved; and then, as we walked home through the dark, Humphrey's arm carefully round me lest I should stumble, I began to tremble for the effect our communication would have upon Miss Grainger. In the hall I paused, and looking timidly up to him, I asked, in a whisper, “ How ever are we to tell Eliza ?"

"Let us do it at once," he said promptly.

She was studying the equinoctial gales when we entered the drawingroom; and Humphrey, leading me to her with something of the grave deference of his old manner to Lavinia, informed her that I had done him the honour to accept him as a suitor. She did not comprehend him at first; but when the truth dawned upon her, she saw in it only a triumph over Lavinia, and she earnestly entreated that we would be married before that treacherous creature. The next day she wrote to Lavinia's aunt, who was of some remote degree of consanguinity, and gave her a highly eulogistic description of Humphrey's bride,-" a young lady quite after my own heart, from the colony of Australia, whose brothers are two of the leading men of Sydney; and who will come into possession of a very large property, bequeathed to her by her estimable father, as soon as she is of age. My brother Humphrey justly considers himself the happiest of men."

We were married, and settled at Russett Farm before Rowland Grain

ger returned. Never did a fastidious, prejudiced gentlewoman suffer a greater agony of dismay than did Miss Grainger, when unexpectedly one day the master of Sherwood Manor presented himself before, her-a brawny, stalwart frame, attired in a blue Guernsey frock belted round the waist, and a bearded, weather-beaten face, round which the hair fell in shaggy locks. But Rowland proved better then we expected. He subsided into a self-contained, rather quiet, and respectable country gentleman, not at all difficult to live with, as Eliza proved, for she continued to reign as lady-paramount at Sherwood Manor; and Rowland was never weary of narrating to her the most extraordinary stories of that long episode in his life which he had spent very far away from the safe domestic circle of anxious relatives, who would have rejoiced in scanning every step of his path from his cradle to his grave.

Breakfast in Bed;

OR, PHILOSOPHY BETWEEN THE SHEETS.

By GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

No. XI.

ON THE DISCOVERY IN ONE'S WAISTCOAT-POCKET OF SOME BONES OF UNUSUAL

CHARACTER.

BONES, forsooth, and in one's waistcoat-pocket too! What next? the outraged reader will probably desire to know. But this is a plain, unvarnished statement; and the fact is as I set it down. Bones of an unusual character were discovered, while I was Breakfasting in Bed on the 2d of July 1863, in a certain waistcoat-pocket, and the waistcoat to which that pocket belonged was mine.

Granted, that such an article of male habiliment is not precisely the place where, under ordinary circumstances, you would look for osseous fragments. The study of comparative anatomy seldom leads a man so far as to induce him to convert his pockets into depositories for bones. Besides, I am neither Professor Owen nor a medical student. You can keep a skeleton in your closet; many persons nurture a serpent in their bosoms; and more than one member of my acquaintance habitually wears a bee in his bonnet; but, for all this, it certainly seems wanting in congruity to turn your vest into a Golgotha. Whence and why these organic remains in the locality above mentioned?

It is nevertheless undeniable that men do carry very strange and surprising things about with them. "The Mysteries of Men's Pockets" would furnish materials for a book fraught with direful interest. There are secrets hidden in the calico-lined recesses of broadcloth and shrunken tweed that would make you shudder if revealed. Yonder rosy-cheeked man, with the simple-minded and unsophisticated countenance, who seems so pleasurably intent on a portrait of the Princess Alexandra in a newsvender's window, what do you think his pockets contain? Nothing less than two pairs of handcuffs, a revolver, a truncheon with a brass crown at the top, and a warrant to take you up, my felonious friend. He is Inspector Weasel of the Detective Force; and, absorbed by the royal portrait as he appears to be, his actual eyes are fixed on William Sykes, Esquire, late of Bermuda, then of Portland, and now of Whitechapel, out of any trade or occupation save burglary, who is lurking over the way, and upon whom he will, within the twinkling of a truncheon, incontinently pounce. And W. S., Esq., himself? Who but the Inspector, to see William arrayed as a peaceable journeyman-carpenter, or inocuous bricklayer's labourer, or inoffensive railway-porter, would imagine that, Iving perdu in William's pocket of velveteen or fustian, there were such

unconsidered trifles as a jemmy or two and a couple of centrebits, a bunch of skeleton-keys, a crape mask, a knuckle-duster, and three inches and a half of wax-candle-the entire apparatus of William's little housebreaking business, in fact? Behold that down-looking individual, who in apparel reminds you equally of a charity schoolmaster and a retired tradesman in a Dissenting neighbourhood. Ask him what he has got in his pocket. A tract? a hymn-book? Not a bit of it. A coil of new rope; and you will swing in it, my blood-thirsty friend, so sure as the downlooking gentleman's name is Calcraft, next Monday morning. If we changed the venue from pockets to parcels, revelations as astounding could be made. Is it possible ever to forget that horribly facetious story of Mr. Greenacre, lightly tripping out of the omnibus with a bundle of something in a blue bag under his arm, 'and remarking, with an air of banter to the conductor as he handed him his fare, that he really thought he ought to have paid for two? The simple cad did not comprehend his meaning then; but the gist of Mr. Greenacre's joke was apparent when it afterwards came out that the blue bag contained the head of Hannah Brown.

It was on a smooth highway once, in mid-spring and in the pleasantest part of the pleasant county of Kent, that, with Eugenius and Orlando, I careered in an open fly. The sun shone; the birds sang; the corn waved. We had lunched well, and proposed to dine even better. We laughed, and chanted carols of revelry. All at once came a rattling along the road, and a chaise-cart, drawn by a plump horse, passed us. There were two policemen in the cart, two merry municipals, who now giggled, and now guffawed, as they retailed, perchance, the scandal of the station, or girded at the inspector. One smoked a short pipe; the other, who held the reins, chewed the cud of sweet fancies in the shape of a flower. Why should not policemen enjoy themselves as well as other people? There jogged between them, in the cart, a certain jar of stoneware, with a piece of leather tied over the top; and, striking up an impromptu acquaintance with the official men, as by the freemasonry of the road we were warranted in doing, we joked them on what the jar might contain, playfully suggesting pickles, beer, or Old Tom, and challenging them to open and allow us to partake of its contents. "I don't think you'd like it, master," the policeman who wasn't driving remarked, removing the short pipe from his lips. "What's in that jar ain't nice, I fancy. It's just the stomach of the old gentleman as was pisoned at Maidstone, and we're takin' it to be hanalysed." That day we laughed no more.

The mention of this alarming occurrence does not, perhaps, tend to the elucidation of the question of domestic paleontology which forms the subject-matter of this Paper. You have my admission that bones -strange bones-were found in my waistcoat-pocket (a dress-waistcoat, too, moire antique); but how came those bones, or any bones at all, there, where no bones should be? In this wise, candour compels me to relate. I presume that a family-man-a person, in short, who is habitually under

the disciplinary control and supervision of other persons who torment him for his good, and make his life miserable in order that he may be happier afterwards-need experience no feeling of humiliation in the knowledge that the wearing-apparel he has cast off is, as a rule, searched before he breakfasts the next morning. If he do feel humiliated, it doesn't much matter. He will be searched all the same. You think, when you have laid your watch, purse, pocket-book, pencil-case, latch-key, and so forth on your dressing-table at night, that you have made a clean sweep of your pockets. "Get all that nonsense out of your head," as C. J. Fox said to Napoleon. The domestic inquisition will be at work; the domestic searchwarrant will be issued; you are sure to have forgotten something in your pockets, and that something is sure to be discovered before you rise again. A due consciousness of this inevitability has led some astute sages to select secret hiding-places in their garments calculated to elude the strictest search. To have secret drawers made in the heels of your boots, and in the event of their being discovered to declare they are spur-boxes, may be, perhaps, going a little too far; and occult pockets in the lining of the back of your coat are apt, if you use them as receptacles for personal effects, to give you the appearance of being humpbacked; but the inside of an umbrella is not a bad place for the concealment of trifles you don't wish discovered—say, the smoking-cap you purchased at Mrs. Pelham Villars' stall at the fancy fair in aid of the funds for the Repentant Ragamuffins' Turkish Baths Association. Let your umbrella be an ugly one, so that the searching officers of your household may not feel inclined to borrow it. An umbrella, however, is easily lost; and the lining of your hat may be, after all, the very best hiding-place for things you are desirous of keeping perdu, such as your proofs of Rafaelle's Madonnas, your certificate as a member of the Anti-Tobacco Association, your temperance medal, and the private addresses of the widows and orphans in New Zealand and the Valleys of Uganda, to whom you have (in the charity and philanthropy of your heart) allocated small annual pensions. Why not lock these articles up? you may ask. Bah! puerility! overweening fatuity! As if other people were not always in the possession of means for opening your drawers and strong-boxes! Women have all acquired, intuitively, an infallible "Open, Sesame." It was Eve, wandering in Eden with nothing to do, save mischief, who first found the weasel asleep, and availed herself of the opportunity to shave off his eyebrows. O Mr. Joseph Charles Parkinson, author of "Under Government;" O communicative writer of "The Master Key to Public Offices;" O soulharrowing editor of the "Note-Book of a Private Detective,"-you don't know what goes on under crinoline government, or what master keys to private offices our domestic detectives keep hanging to the prettiest of châtelaines. You never imagine that dear, smiling Mrs. Candour was born Mademoiselle Fouché; and that Mrs. Lambkin's first husband was Captain Yarde, from Scotland. It is better that we should remain in ignorance of the whole extent of espionage that is exercised over us. If