I just then faintly recollected the name of Clarges, as having occurred in the conversation at the watchmaker's, and as being the name of him who had produced the paper. This, then, was the person who was to have been introduced to me as the friend in need, the meritorious father of a numerous family, whom the payment of a just debt was to relieve from imminent ruin! How loathsome, how detestable, how insecure, are fraud and treachery! Had he been confronted with me, no doubt he would have recognised the person whom he stared at at the watch-maker's. Next morning I received a note, dated on the preceding evening. These were the terms of it:-- "I am sorry to say, Jane, that the ruin of a father and brother may justly be laid at your door. Not to save them, when the means were in your power, and when entreated to use the means, makes you the author of their ruin. The crisis has come. Had you shown a little mercy, the crisis might have terminated favourably. As it is, we are undone. You do not deserve to know the place of my retreat. Your unsisterly heart will prompt you to intercept rather than to aid or connive at my flight. Fly I must; whither, it is pretty certain, will never come to your knowledge. Farewell." My brother's disappearance, the immediate ruin of my father, whose whole fortune was absorbed by debts contracted in his name, and for the most part without his knowledge, the sudden affluence of the adventurer who had suggested his projects to my brother, were the immediate consequences of this event. To a man of my father's habits and views, no calamity can be conceived greater than this. Never did I witness a more sincere grief, a more thorough despair. Every thing he once possessed was taken away from him and sold. My mother, however, prevented all the most opprobrious effects of poverty, and all in my power to alleviate his solitude, and console him in his distress, was done. Would you have thought, after this simple relation, that there was any room for malice and detraction to build up their inventions? My brother was enraged that I refused to comply with any of his demands; not grateful for the instances in which I did comply. Clarges resented the disappointment of his scheme as much as if honour and integrity had given him a title to success. How many times has the story been told, and with what variety of exaggeration, that the sister refused to lend her brother money, when she had plenty at command, and when a seasonable loan would have prevented the ruin of her family, while, at the same time, she had such an appetite for toys and baubles, that ere yet she was eighteen years old she ran in debt to Clarges the jeweller for upwards of five hundred dollars'-worth!