Jobby, when informed of the primitive and paradisiacal condition of his parent, chuckled inwardly as he foresaw the dilemma in which the disclosure he had to make would place the nether half of the old gentleman. Accordingly, when Sandboys confidentially solicited him to put on his father’s shoes, and make the greatest possible haste over to Johnson for his father’s best trousers, it was with some difficulty that his son could inform him, with that respect which is due to a parent, that, on his last fruitless visit to Brackenthwaite, John Coss had told him he was going to call at Loweswater, on his way to Carlisle, and take up all the Johnsons, both uncle and nephew, for the mail train to London. This was more than poor Sandboys expected, and a heavy blow to him, for he foresaw that the proprieties of life would compel him to keep between the sheets, until such time as he could venture to broach the subject of his denuded and destitute state to his better half. To lie in bed was his only resource; but to lie in bed was to make him more and more sensible of the utter destitution in which he was involved. He had received no newspapers for a fortnight, and of all things he loved his newspapers the dearest. The loss of them in such a state, at such a time, he felt more than all. He might, perhaps, have borne the absence of his pantaloons with all the pride of martyrdom; but to be cut off from connexion with the outer world of wickedness, in which he took such extreme interest, was more than human philosophy or mountain stoicism could bear—for what is solitude without a newspaper! Here was he, three hundred and one miles from London, in a lonely house, without a single “daring robbery” to comfort him, or a “diabolical murder” to put life into him! All the “successful swindling” of the metropolis was going on without his knowledge; and the excursionists from his native county were, he felt satisfied, being plundered, one and all, without his being, as he longed to be. in any way privy to it! In this situation, thus contemplating, Mr. Sandboys passed the day—a Zimmerman between the blankets. At last, as the shades of night began to shut out Melbrake from before his bed-room window, and when Mrs. Sandboys came to his bedside for the basin which had contained his thin meal of gruel, as he sat up to receive her he humbly petitioned her, with a melancholy shake of the tuft on the top of his white cotton night-cap, to allow him one of the old newspapers and a light, so that he might relieve his mind by perusing some of the trials at the Central Criminal Court? if he might be allowed to choose, he would prefer that _Observer_ and supplement which contained those charming twenty columns of the last frightful London murder.