ance with the dear child's wish. I am certain it would prove a source of great disappointment to frustrate it."

"Then let me be no advocate for so doing," returned Ned.

"You will accompany us?" rejoined the

vicar.

"An engagement prevents my so doing," added Ned; "but I hope to be with you in a few days."

"Prevents you!" exclaimed Grace, in surprise. "Can your engagement make any difference whether you be here or at the vicarage?"

Ned was somewhat puzzled at this question; but he answered that "it did, and for a short, very short time he should not be able to avail himself of the polite and friendly invitation."

"You must not be absent from us long, however," said the vicar. "But," continued

he, "let us not talk of parting. 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.'"

Shortly after this Ned took leave for the night, rquesting, before he went, that Mr Wells would meet him at an early hour on the following morning, adding, while he squeezed the small fingers of Grace, that he had something particular to communicate.

"I will be with you at sunrise," replied the vicar, "on the East cliff; but," continued he, laughing, "not too close to the edge of it."

"And now," said Ned, thoughtfully, as he bent his way to his lodgings, "I must seek Bamfield Carew, and be guided by him in this business. Danger is before and behind: so much the better. I love it, and 'tis never far from me."

CHAPTER III.

"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may divine laws for the blood; but a hot temper leaps over a cold decree: such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o'er the meshes of good council the cripple."

"O YES!" exclaimed Squire Merton, lying upon the flat of his back at full length on a sofa of very faded and antiquated appear. ance, "O yes!" repeated he, sipping a glass of exceedingly questionable port wine, and trying to look as if he liked it, "there's nothing simpler in the wide world, Charles. To preach-God bless my life! I would enter myself, fairly handicapped, with all the catholic and apostolic bishops in Chris

tendom for a sermon of one heat, and then freely and with pleasure back myself, at trifling odds, to take the lead and keep it to the finish. Faugh! preaching, indeed!"

"My dear father," replied Charles, smiling at the sporting description given of a discourse without the pale of ridicule, and in which the squire had no intention of indulging, "I entertained no idea of lecturing; but was merely giving my council for an observance of prudence so indispensable in the desperate condition of our pecuniary matters."

"And worthy it was of a flageolet-faced chancellor of the exchequer about to produce a shocking bad budget," rejoined the squire, draining his glass; and, as he did so, the expression of his features bore a close resemblance to the palate's having undergone the ordeal of a powerful dose of senna and salts, castor oil, or rhubarb.

"But you must confess," returned his son mildly, and scarcely able to retain a

seriousness of manner, "that ordering six dozen of port wine on the weakness—”

"The strength," interrupted the squire, raising himself from his recumbent attitude and looking his son steadfastly in the face; "on the strength of the funds received, my dear boy, I gave the order. Don't talk of

weakness in such a harvest of unexpected plenty."

"But twenty-five pounds will soon be gone," returned Charles. "Indeed, I may say, it is already expended.

"When the things are paid for," added the squire. "Well, well! No one but must say that I evinced a high degree of economy in its outlay. Let me see," he continued, pressing a finger upon his brow. "Eight bushels of meal for the hounds; three sacks of oats and a load of hay for the stud; and six dozen of port wine for the cellar, which, from my heart, Charles, I religiously wish was of a better quality, and did not so