On the Sunday (for I suppose the reader is aware that I was intimately acquainted with the causes of the alarm) it was very amusing to watch the different faces of terror or expectation which appeared at public worship, to mark the quivering hue on the sallow cheek of the exciseman, and listen to the querulous intonation of the clerk’s Amen. When at last the sermon was concluded, Nicholas gave his final twang in such a manner that to my ears it resembled an _Io pæan_. He rose from his knees with a countenance of such unmingled, unrepressed triumph, that I could no longer restrain myself! I laughed. Alas! dearly did I rue, unhappy wight, that freak of sacrilegious jocularity. “And is this all!” See now; you laugh at this deception because a foolish boy was its instrument, and an honest clerk its victim. Have you not often pored, with romantic interest, upon tales of impostures equally gross? Have you not read with horror the celebrated warning of Dion? Have you not shuddered at, “I am thine evil spirit, Brutus; thou shalt see me again at Philippi?” and yet What’s in a name? “Nicholas” will raise a spirit as well as “Brutus.” The dictator’s seat was soon after vacated. Ellen, the Vicar’s daughter, had died some years before; and her father, finding himself unable to reconcile himself to the residence which she had so long endeared to him, prepared to quit the village. It was supposed that poor Nicholas was overpowered by the misfortune of his patron: certain it is that he died very quietly one fine summer’s evening, quite prepared for his end, and in the fullest possession of his faculties. He was followed to his grave by as sincere a crowd of mourners as ever wept at a poor man’s obsequies. There is no urn, no column, no monumental splendour where he sleeps! But what of this? Nicholas is dust--and so is Cheops.