to the public-house rejoicing in the title of "The Case is Altered." The supper was of hot steak-pudding, made savoury with pepper and onions. Peter M'Dougal ate plentifully and deliberately. Slowly also he drank two stiff tumblers of whiskey punch, smoking his pipe meanwhile without uttering a word. The second tumbler was followed by a third, and as he sipped the latter half of it, his entertainers closed round him, and intimated that their part of the contract being accomplished, he, as a man of honour, ought to fulfill his. Peter was a man of few words, and without any unnecessary prelude or comment, he stated in one laconic speech the secret of his professional success. Laying down his pipe by his empty glass, and emitting from his gray eyes a light of strange humour, he said drily, "Ye'd knoo hoo it was I cam to mak sae guid a sale o' my beasties? Weel, I ken it was joost this--_I fund a fule!_" The drover who rises to be a capitalist, and the lawyer who mounts to the woolsack, ascend by the same process. They know how to find out fools, and how to turn their discoveries to advantage. It is told of a Barbadoes physician and slaveholder, that having been robbed to a serious extent in his sugar-works, he discovered the thief by the following ingenious artifice. Having called his slaves together, he addressed them thus:--"My friends, the great serpent appeared to me during the night, and told me that the person who stole my money should, at this instant--_this very instant_--have a parrot's feather at the point of his nose." On this announcement, the dishonest thief, anxious to find out if his guilt had declared itself, put his finger to his nose. "Man," cried the master instantly, "'tis thou who hast robbed me. The great serpent has just told me so." Clearly this piece of quackery succeeded, because the quack had "fund a fule." CHAPTER VII. JOHN RADCLIFFE.