The Trail of the Serpent quotes

That dingy stream, the Sloshy, was swollen into a kind of dirty Mississippi, and the graceful coal-barges which adorned its bosom were stripped of the clotheslines and fluttering linen which usually were to be seen on their decks.

A bad, determined, black-minded November day.

A day on which the fog shaped itself into a demon, and lurked behind men’s shoulders, whispering into their ears, “Cut your throat!—you know you’ve got a razor, and can’t shave with it, because you’ve been drinking and your hand shakes;

Why, it whistles in your ear a reminder of the little bottle of laudanum you’ve got upstairs, which you had for your toothache last week, and never used. A foggy wet windy November day. A bad day—a dangerous day.

Keep us from bad thoughts today, and keep us out of the Police Reports next week.

Give us a glass of something hot and strong, and a bit of something nice for supper, and bear with us a little this day;

… by the influence of damp and fog, how do we know that there may not be some string in this more critical instrument, the human mind, not made on mechanical principles or by mortal hands, a little out of order on this bad November day?

But of course bad influences can only come to bad men; and of course he must be a very bad man whose spirits go up and down with every fluctuation of the weatherglass.

Virtuous people no doubt are virtuous always; and by no chance, or change, or trial, or temptation, can they ever become other than virtuous. Therefore why should a wet day or a dark day depress them? No;

But he was a good young man; a benevolent young man; giving in secret, and generally getting his reward openly.

His left hand scarcely knew what his right hand did; but Slopperton always knew it before long.

So every citizen of the borough raised and applauded this model young man, and many were the prophecies of the day when the pauper boy should be one of the greatest men in that greatest of all towns, the town of Slopperton.

Some natures too may be so weak and sentimental as to sicken at a life without one human tie; a boyhood without father or mother; a youth without sister or brother. Not such the excellent nature of Jabez North.

Tyranny found him meek, it is true, but it left him much meeker.

Insult found him mild, but it left him lamblike. Scornful speeches glanced away from him; cruel words seemed drops of water on marble, so powerless were they to strike or wound.

Richard looked up this time with a hopeful light in his dark eyes.

He was hopeless at five minutes past ten; he was radiant when the minute hand had moved on to the next figure on the dial.

He was one of those men whose bad and good angels have a sharp fight and a constant struggle, but whom we all hope to see saved at last.

with the rain beating on the roof, as if it had a special purpose and was bent on flooding the old house; there is peace and happiness, and a returned and penitent wanderer at the desolate old Black Mill.

The wind this night seems to howl with a peculiar significance, but nobody has the key to its strange language; and if, in every shrill dissonant shriek, it tries to tell a ghastly secret or to give a timely warning, it tries in vain, for no one heeds or understands.

“If he said any good of me, it’s a great deal more than I deserve,” said Richard to himself; “but I’m young yet, and there’s plenty of time to redeem the past.”

Time to redeem the past! O poor Richard!

He twisted the letter about in his hands, lighted another pipe, and smoked till the train arrived at the Gardenford station. Another foggy November day had set in.

Jinks’s quiet friend was exactly one of those people adapted to pass in a crowd. He might have passed in a hundred crowds, and no one of the hundreds of people in any of those hundred crowds would have glanced aside to look at him.

You could only describe him by negatives.

He was neither very tall nor very short, he was neither very stout nor very thin, neither dark nor fair, neither ugly nor handsome; but just such a medium between the two extremities of each as to be utterly commonplace and unnoticeable.

The Sloshy is not a beautiful river, unless indeed mud is beautiful, for it is very muddy.

The Sloshy is a disagreeable kind of compromise between a river and a canal. It is like a canal which (after the manner of the mythic frog that wanted to be an ox) had seen a river, and swelled itself to bursting in imitation thereof.

She may remember it only as a shame, a burden, and a grief. She has been pretty; a bright country beauty, perhaps, a year ago; but she is a faded, careworn-looking creature now, with a pale face, and hollow circles round her eyes.

She has played the only game a woman has to play, and lost the only stake a woman has to lose.

“I wonder whether he will come, or whether I must wear out my heart through another long long day.—Hush, hush! As if my trouble was not bad enough without your crying.”

Gentlemen of the Press were there, sniffing out, with miraculous acumen, particulars of the murder, which as yet were known to none but the heads of the Slopperton police force.

How many lines at three-half-pence per line these gentlemen wrote concerning the dreadful occurrence, without knowing anything whatever about it, no one unacquainted with the mysteries of their art would dare to say.

The two papers which appeared on Friday had accounts varying in every item, and the one paper which appeared on Saturday had a happy amalgamation of the two conflicting accounts—demonstrating thereby the triumph of paste and scissors over penny-a-liners’ copy.

in five minutes more Mr. Jinks the detective was on the platform, and his dumb assistant, Joe Peters, was ready outside the station; and they both were ready to recognize Richard the moment they saw him.

O wonders of civilized life! cruel wonders, when you help to track an innocent man to a dreadful doom.

Richard’s story of the letter only damaged his case with the jury. The fact of his having burned a document of such importance seemed too incredible to make any impression in his favour.

The dreary winter months pass by.

Time, slow of foot to some, and fast of wing to others, is a very chameleon, such different accounts do different people give of him.

He is very rapid in his flight, no doubt, for the young gentlemen from Dr. Tappenden’s home for the Christmas holidays: rapid enough perhaps for the young gentlemen’s papas, who have to send their sons back to the academy armed with Dr.

and I dare say, by the blazing hearth, where the firelight falls dullest upon his mother’s black dress, he sometimes thinks very sadly of the little grave out in the bleak winter night, on which the snow falls so purely white.

But “cakes and ale” are eternal institutions; and if you or I, reader, died tomorrow, the baker would still bake, and Messrs. Barclay and Perkins would continue to brew the ale and stout for which they are so famous, and the friends who were sorriest for us would eat, drink, ay and be merry too, before long.

Who shall say how slow of foot is Time to the miserable young man awaiting his trial in the dreary gaol of Slopperton?

Kuppins doted on babies; had nursed nine brothers and sisters, and had nursed outside the family circle, at the rate of fifteen-pence a week, for some years.

Kuppins had been out in the world from the age of twelve, and was used up as to Slopperton at sixteen.

Mr. Peters stated by means of the dirty alphabet—(more than usually dirty today, after his journey from Gardenford, whence he had transplanted his household gods, namely, the gingham umbrella, the bundle, parcel, pocketbook, and comb)—that he would go and fetch the baby.

There had been betting in Slopperton on the result of this awful hazard.

For the theory of chances is to certain minds so delightful, that the range of subjects for a wager may ascend from a maggot-race to a trial for murder.

Some adventurous spirits had taken desperate odds against the outsider “Acquittal;” and many enterprising gentlemen had made what they considered “good books,” by putting heavy sums on the decided favourite, “Found Guilty.”

“Certainly,” replied the witness. “

Rum, an adjective when applied to a gentleman’s conduct; a substantive when used to denominate his tipple.

”

The counsel for the prosecution doesn’t clearly understand the meaning of the word “tipple.”

The witness thinks the learned gentleman had better buy a dictionary before he again assists in a criminal prosecution.

“Come, come, sir,” said the judge; “you are extremely impertinent. We don’t want to be kept here all night. Let us have your evidence in a straightforward manner.”

No, no! Never could he fathom the depth of this love which looks down at him now with more than a mother’s tenderness, with more than a sister’s devotion, with more than a wife’s self-abnegation.

This love, which knows no change, which would shelter him in those entwining arms a thief or a murderer, and which could hold him no dearer were he a king upon a throne.

Jabez North goes for a doctor, and returns presently with a gentleman, who, on seeing Jim the labourer, pronounces that he had better go to bed at once;

I’m old and feeble, and you might easily do it—eh? But you won’t—you won’t, deary! You know better than that! Kill me, and you’ll never know the secret!—the secret that may be gold to you some day, and that nobody alive but me can tell.

If you’d got some very precious wine in a glass bottle, my dear, you wouldn’t smash the bottle now, would you? because, you see, you couldn’t smash the bottle without spilling the wine.

And you won’t lay so much as a rough finger upon me, I know.”

There was sufficient left, however, of the liveliness of a long time ago to give an air of ghastly mirth to the old woman’s manner, which made that manner extremely repulsive.

What can be more repulsive than old age, which, shorn of the beauties and graces, is yet not purified from the follies or the vices of departed youth?

“And so, my dear, the water wasn’t deep enough, and you were saved. How did it all come about? Tell us, my precious boy?”

Blue lightning-flashes lit up Blind Peter, and attendant thunderclaps shook him to his very foundation; while a violent shower of rain gave him such a washing-down of every flagstone, chimney-pot, and doorstep, as he did not often get.

Slopperton in bed was almost afraid to go to sleep; and Slopperton not in bed did not seem to care about going to bed.

Slopperton at supper was nervous as to handling of glittering knives and steel forks; and Slopperton going to windows to look out at the lightning was apt to withdraw hurriedly at the sight thereof. Slopperton in general was depressed by the storm;

“Perhaps,” said Sarah Anne, rather maliciously—“perhaps he’s been forgetting his situation and giving way to thoughts of marrying our young missus. She’s got a deal of money, you know, Miss Smithers, though her figure ain’t much to look at.”

Sarah Anne’s figure was plenty to look at, having a tendency to break out into luxuriance where you least expected it.

It was in vain that Sarah Anne or Miss Smithers speculated on the probable causes of the usher’s absence.

But a jolly good poisoning case might make my fortune. If that there little ’un was growed up,” he mentally ejaculated, as Kuppins’s charge gave an unusually loud scream, “his lungs might be a fortune to me. Lord,” he continued, waxing metaphysical, “

I don’t look upon that hinfant as a hinfant, I looks upon him as a voice.

”

Never had the dirty alphabet fashioned such sweet words. A drive in Mr. Vorkins’s trap, and the Rosebush tea-gardens!

If Kuppins had been a fairy changeling, and had awoke one morning to find herself a queen, I don’t think she would have chosen any higher delight wherewith to celebrate her accession to the throne.

Kuppins had, during the few months of Mr. Peters’s residence in the indoor Eden of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, won a very high place in that gentleman’s regards. The elderly proprietress of the Eden was as nothing in the eyes of Mr.

“Thank you, Smithers, I am better,” replied the young lady, with languid condescension.

Miss Tappenden, on the strength of never having anything the matter with her, was always complaining, and passed her existence in taking sal-volatile and red lavender, and reading three volumes a day from the circulating library.

“And how,” asked the ponderous voice of the ponderous Doctor, “how is everything going on, Smithers?”

exclaimed Dr. Tappenden, in the tone of a man who says—“The glory of England has departed! You wouldn’t, perhaps, believe it; but it has!”

“We didn’t know what to do, sir, and so we thought we’d better not do it,”

continued the bewildered Smithers. “And we thought as you was coming back today, we’d better leave it till you did come back—and please, sir, will you take any new-laid eggs?”

If he is right, it is the best and swiftest way of coming at the truth; if wrong, he is no worse off than before. One glance at the girl’s face tells him he has struck home, and has hit upon the entire truth.

He is striking in the dark; but he is a mathematician, and can calculate the effect of every blow.

“Yes, a secret marriage, of which you were the witness.” This is his second blow; and again the girl’s face tells him he has struck home.

“But, on the other hand, I may not use my power; and, indeed, I should deeply regret the painful necessity which would compel me to injure a lady.”

Mademoiselle Finette, encouraged by this speech, wiped away the digestive pill.

“Therefore, mademoiselle, the case resolves itself to this: serve me, and I will reward you; refuse to do so, and I can injure you.”

If the worst man who looked at him could have seen straight through those clear blue eyes into his soul, would there have been something revealed which might have shocked and revolted even this worst man? Perhaps.

Treachery is revolting, surely, to the worst of us.

The worst of us might shrink appalled from the contemplation of those hideous secrets which are hidden in the plotting brain and the unflinching heart of the cold-blooded traitor.

and when the schemer has finished speaking she slides heavily from her chair, and falls on her knees upon the Persian hearthrug, with her small hands convulsively clasped about her heart. But she is not insensible, and she never takes her eyes from his face.

She is a woman who neither weeps nor faints⁠—she suffers.

“I am here, madame,” the lounger continues—and now she listens to him eagerly; “I am here for two purposes. To help myself before all things; to help you afterwards, if I can.

… he was a false god, and the attributes for which you worshipped him—truth, loyalty, and genius, such as man never before possessed—were not his, but the offspring of your own imagination, with which you invested him, because you were in love with his handsome face.

Bah! madame, after all, you were only the fool of a chiselled profile and a melodious voice.

You are not the first of your sex so fooled; Heaven forbid you should be the last!”

and he can tell what she has suffered since last night by the change in her voice alone. It has a dull and monotonous sound, and the tone seems to have gone out of it forever.

If the dead could speak, they might speak thus.

“This way, then, madame,” he says. “My first object is to convince you of the treachery of the man for whom you have sacrificed so much. Have you strength to live through the discovery?”

“And that you can pay me well.

I am no Don Quixote, madame; nor have I any great respect for that gentleman.

Believe me, I intend that you shall pay me well for my services, as you will learn by-and-by.”

“Perhaps. Look you, madame: you despise me because I am an adventurer. Had I been born in the purple—lord, even in my cradle, of wide lands and a great name, you would respect me.

Now, I respect myself because I am an adventurer; because by the force alone of my own mind I have risen from what I was, to be what I am.

I will show you my cradle some day. It had no tapestried coverlet or embroidered curtains, I can assure you.”

“Before twelve o’clock tomorrow night the king of spades will be dead!” says the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset. The voices of the clocks of Paris seem to take up Monsieur Blurosset’s voice as they strike the hour of midnight.

Twenty-four hours for the king of spades!

Monsieur Blurosset gathers up his cards and drops them into his pocket. Malicious people say that he sleeps with them under his pillow; that he plays écarté by himself in his sleep;

The poor blunderers can only give him half a pint of laudanum, or an ounce or so of arsenic, and run the risk of detection half an hour after his death!

I think that time is a circle, and that we retreat as we advance, in spite of our talk of progress.

”

and in a couple of weeks he was forgotten. If he had been a great general, or a great minister, it is possible that he would not have been remembered much longer.

The new tenor had a fair complexion and blue eyes, and had two extra notes of falsetto.

So the opera-house was as brilliant as ever, though there was for the time being a prejudice among opera-goers and opera-singers against Lucretia Borgia, and that opera was put on the shelf for the remainder of the season.

He gave a low musical laugh. “Pardon me, mademoiselle,” he said, “but really your words amuse me. ‘A disinterested villain!’

Believe me, when I tell you that disinterested villainy is as great an impossibility as disinterested virtue.

You are mistaken, mademoiselle, but only as to the nature of the reward I come to claim. You would confine the question to one of money.

In the autumn of the eighth year he fell ill. A strange illness. Perhaps scarcely to be called an illness.

Rather a dying out of the last light of hope, and an utter abandonment of himself to despair.

Yes, that was the name of the disease under which the high and bold spirit of Daredevil Dick sank at last. Despair. A curious disease. Not to be cured by rules and regulations, however salutary those rules might be;

This small boy was standing rubbing his right little foot against his left little wizen leg, and looking intently at Richard.

To say that his tiny face had a great deal of character in it would not be to say much; what face he had was all character.

Determination, concentration, energy, strength of will, and brightness of intellect, were all written in unmistakable lines upon that pale pinched face. The boy’s features were wonderfully regular, and had nothing in common with the ordinary features of a boy of his age and his class;

“

Surname and christen name too, sir. Slosh⁠—short for Sloshy.

”

It would intrude, an uninvited guest, at a social tea-party, and suddenly isolate every visitor on his or her chair as on an island.

There was not a mouse or a black-beetle in any of the kitchens by the Sloshy whose life was worth the holding, such an enemy was the swelling water to all domestic peace or comfort.

It is true that to some fresh and adventurous spirits the rising of the river afforded a kind of eccentric gratification. It gave a smack of the flavour of Venice to the dull insipidity of Slopperton life;

This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the water; and in the streets and squares—to say nothing of the court and mews—round this establishment the name of Augustus Darley is synonymous with everything which is popular and pleasant.

His very presence is said to be as good as physic.

Now, as physic in the abstract, and apart from its curative qualities, is scarcely a very pleasant thing, this may be considered rather a doubtful compliment; but for all that, it was meant in perfect good faith, and what’s more, it meant a great deal.

They have passed away from us; their language is not our language, nor their world our world. I think someone has asked a strange question—

Who can tell whether their folly may not perhaps be better than our wisdom?

He only, from whose mighty hand comes the music of every soul, can tell which is the discord and which the harmony. We look at them as we look at all else—through the darkened glass of earth’s uncertainty.

No, they do not seem unhappy. Queen Victoria is talking to Lady Jane Grey about today’s dinner, and the reprehensible superabundance of fat in a leg-of-mutton served up thereat.

Chronology never disturbs these good people; nobody thinks it any disgrace to be an anachronism.

Lord Brougham will divide an unripe apple with Cicero, and William the Conqueror will walk arm-in-arm with Pius the Ninth, without the least uneasiness on the score of probability;

There was one advantage in conversing with this gentleman.

If his questions were sometimes of rather a difficult and puzzling nature, he never did anything so underbred as to wait for an answer.

It now appeared for the first time to strike him, that perhaps the laws of exclusiveness had in some manner been violated, by a person of his distinction having talked so familiarly to an entire stranger;

Eight years, too, have done something for Kuppins. Time hasn’t forgotten Kuppins, though she is a humble individual.

Time has touched up Kuppins; adding a little bit here, and taking away a little bit there, and altogether producing something rather imposing.

Kuppins has grown.

How did he ever live through it? He had no means of suicide? Pshaw! he might have dashed out his brains against the wall. He might have resolutely refused food, and so have starved himself to death. How did he endure it.

Eight years! Eight centuries! and every hour a fresh age of anguish!

Looking back now, he knows, what then he did not know, that at the worst—that in his bitterest despair, there was a vague undefined something, so vague and undefined that he did not recognise it for itself—a glimmering ray of hope, by the aid of …

… head he renders up to that God from whose pity came this distant light a thanksgiving, which perhaps is not the less sincere and heartfelt for a hundred reckless words, said long ago, which rise up now in his mind a shame and a reproach.

Perhaps it was such a trial as this that Richard Marwood wanted, to make him a good and earnest man.

Something to awaken dormant energies; something to arouse the better feelings of a noble soul, to stimulate to action an intellect hitherto wasted;

it may surround its possessors with beauty, grace, art, luxury, and so-called pleasure; but it cannot shut out death or care; for to these stern visitors Mayfair and St. Giles’s must alike open their reluctant doors whenever the dreaded guests may be pleased to call.

You do not send cards for your morning concerts, or fêtes champêtres, or thés dansantes, to Sorrow or Sadness, oh noble duchesses and countesses; but have you never seen their face in the crowd when you least looked to meet them?

Through the foliage and rich blossoms in the conservatory, and through the white damask curtains of the long French window, the autumn sunshine comes with subdued light into a boudoir on the second floor of a large house in Park Lane.

“Not a bit of it,” said the youthful enthusiast. “

I’d hang my grandmother for a sovering, and the pride of catching her, she was a downy one.

”

“

Make sure that it is a delusion, before you say they were fooled by it, Captain.

”

“

The man to whom I am at present married is not the father of my son,

” says Valerie, in a cold calm voice.

Thirty years of age—fair and pale, blue eyes, aquiline nose, and thin lips again; and neither of the two faces to be trusted; not one look of truth, not one glance of benevolence, not one noble expression in either.

Truly father and son⁠—all the world over, father and son.

“Monsieur le Marquis affords me an unexpected honour and pleasure,” said Raymond Marolles, as he advanced to receive his visitor.

“I have not the least wish to quarrel with you, my good friend. Nay, on the contrary, I will freely confess that I am not without a certain amount of respect for you.

You are a thorough villain. Everything thorough is, in my mind, estimable.

Virtue is said to lie in the golden mean—virtue is not in my way; I therefore do not dispute the question—but to me all mediums are contemptible. You are, in your way, thorough; and, on the whole, I respect you.”

So with you, my dear Marolles, there was but one resource left you—to disprove the revelations of your wife by declaring them the hallucinations of a maniac. I take no credit to myself for seeing through you, I assure you.

There is no talent whatever in finding out that two and two make four; the genius would be the man who made them into five.

I do not think I have anything more to say. I have no wish to attack you, my dear nephew-in-law. I merely wanted to prove to you that I was not your dupe.

What is it? So great and marvellous an alteration, he might almost doubt if this indeed were she. And yet he can scarcely define the change. It seems a transformation, not of the face, but of the soul.

A new soul looking out of the old beauty.

A new soul? No, the old soul, which he thought dead. It is indeed a resurrection of the dead.

“For mercy’s sake, my dear girl,” says the Marquis, in a tone of horror, “don’t be melodramatic.

If you’re going to act a Porte-St.-Martin drama, in thirteen acts and twenty-six tableaux, I’ll go back to Paris.

If you’ve nothing to say to me, why, in the name of all that’s feminine, did you send for me?”

It is melodramatic certainly, but excessively convenient. I have remarked, that in melodrama circumstances generally are convenient.

I never alarm myself when everything is hopelessly wrong, and villainy deliciously triumphant; for I know that somebody who died in the first act will come in at the centre doors, and make it all right before the curtain falls.

”

I have very little curiosity. I dare say he is a very worthy individual; but I have no anxiety whatever about his fate; for if he at all resembles his father, there is very little doubt that he has taken every care of himself.

The De Cevennes have always taken care of themselves; it is a family trait.

”

he scarcely touched that! You are angry with your better half, and you wish to give him, as you elegantly put it, a bit of your mind.

My good soul, what does Tom care for you⁠—behind his pipe?

Do you think he is listening to you, or thinking of you, as he sits lazily watching with dreamy eyes the blue wreaths of smoke curling upwards from that honest meerschaum bowl?

Gus told the youthful domestic that he had a letter for Mrs. Jones. Martha’s surname was Jones; the Mrs. was an honorary distinction, as the holy state of matrimony was one of the evils the worthy woman had escaped.

Gus brought a note from Martha’s mistress, which assured him a warm welcome.

“Would the gentlemen have tea?” Martha said. “Sararanne—(the youthful domestic’s name was Sarah Anne, pronounced, both for euphony and convenience, Sararanne)—Sararanne should get them anything they would please to like directly.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed the admiring Gus, “you’ve got it, then! Egad, Peters, I think you’d make evidence, if there wasn’t any.”

“Eight years of that young man’s life, sir,” said the rapid fingers, “has been sacrificed to the stupidity of them as should have pulled him through.”

… if not his sweetness, on the desert air, pined for the familiar shades of Bow Street and Vinegar Yard, and the home-sounds of the rumbling and jingling of the wagons, and the unpolite language of the drivers thereof, on market mornings in the adjacent market.

Pleasures and palaces are all very well in their way, as the song says; but there is just one little spot on earth which, whether it be a garret in Petticoat Lane or a mansion in Belgrave Square, is apt to be dearer to us than the best of them;

and the Smasher languishes for the friendly touch of the ebony handles of the porter-engine, and the scent of the Welsh rarebits of his youth.

… anxious and very uneasy about the manner in which the coffin was to be hauled up the side of the vessel, he laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder, and said—“I want the lid of that coffin taken off before those men haul it up.”

Such a change came over the face of the cheerful gentleman as only comes over the face of a man who knows that he is playing a desperate game, and knows as surely that he has lost it.

“My good sir,” he said, “you’re mad. Not for the Queen of England would I see that coffin-lid unscrewed.”

Throughout the little voyage there were no words spoken but these from the Liverpool detective, as he first put the fetters on the white and slender wrists of his prisoner:

“Monsieur de Marolles,” he said, “you’ve tried this little game once before. This is the second occasion, I understand, on which you’ve done a sham die. I’d have you beware of the third time. According to superstitious people, it’s generally fatal.”

… the autumn of the year, had to await the spring assizes of the following year for his trial, and had, therefore, to drag out even a longer period in his solitary cell than Richard Marwood, the innocent victim of circumstantial evidence, had done years before.

Who shall dare to enter this man’s cell? Who shall dare to look into this hardened heart? Who shall follow the dark and terrible speculations of this perverted intellect?

At last the time, so welcome to the free citizens of Slopperton, and so very unwelcome to some of the denizens in the gaol, who preferred awaiting their trial in that retreat to crossing the briny ocean for an unlimited period as the issue of …

“They must be a jolly ignorant lot, then, anyways,” replied Mr. Withers, with more candour than circumlocution.

“Any infant knows eighteenpence ven it’s showed him.”

“Oh, a bob and a tanner are eighteenpence? Very good,” said the counsel, encouragingly; “pray go on, Mr. Withers.”

Here Mr. Withers paused for refreshment after his exertions, and blew his nose very deliberately on a handkerchief which, from its dilapidated condition, resembled a red cotton cabbagenet.

Silence reigned throughout the crowded court, broken only by the scratching of the pen with which the counsel for the defence was taking notes of the evidence, and the fluttering of the leaves of the reporters’ pocketbooks, as they threw off page after page of flimsy paper.

The prisoner at the bar looked straight before him; the firmly-compressed lips had never once quivered, the golden fringed eyelashes had never drooped.

“I can,” replied Mr. Withers. “That’s him! or my name ain’t vot I’ve been led to believe it is.” And he pointed with a dirty but decided finger at the prisoner at the bar.

The prisoner slightly elevated his arched eyebrows superciliously, as if he would say, “This is a pretty sort of witness to hang a man of my standing.”

“Be so good as to continue your story,” said the counsel.