morning he hears the magician, too honest by half, enquiring at the front door, with much expression of condolence, for the unfortunate young man who had lost his ropes in his own zenana. Upon this story I used to amuse my sister, by ventriloquizing to the magician from the lips of the trembling young man--"Oh, Mr Magician, these ropes cannot be mine! They are far too good; and one wouldn't like, you know, to rob some other poor young man. If you please, Mr Magician, I never had money enough to buy so beautiful a set of ropes." But argument is thrown away upon a magician, and off he sets on his travels with the young porter--not forgetting to take the ropes along with him. Here now was the case, that had once seemed so impressive to me in a mere fiction from a far-distant age and land, literally reproduced in myself. For what did it matter whether a magician dunned one with old ropes for his engines of torture, or Stationers' Hall with 15,000 volumes, (in the rear of which there might also be ropes?) Should _I_ have ventriloquized, would my sister have laughed, had either of us but guessed the possibility that I myself, and within one twelve months, and, alas! standing alone in the world as regarded _confidential_ counsel, should repeat within my own inner experience the shadowy panic of the young Bagdat intruder upon the privacy of magicians? It appeared, then, that I had been reading a legend concerning myself in the _Arabian Nights_. I had been contemplated in types a thousand years before on the banks of the Tigris. It was horror and grief that prompted that thought.