Mr. Brewer was an extraordinary man. He had a turn for the supernatural. He would have liked above all things to have worked miracles. He did do odd things, such as we have seen, which he made, by means of the poetic quality that characterized him, a purely natural act. He was praising George for a saving, prudent, industrious young man, who had never drawn the whole of his last year's salary, before an hour was over. And his story looked so like truth that he believed it himself. Mr. Brewer was what people call "a risen man." But then his father had been rising--and, for the matter of that, his grandfather too. All their fortunes had flowed into the life of the man who has got into this story; and he, having had a tide of prosperity exceeding all others, in height, and strength, and riches, had found himself stranded on the great shore of society, at forty years of age, with more thousands a year than he liked to be generally known. Could he have transformed himself into a benignant fairy he would have been very happy, and acts of mercy would have abounded on the earth. But no--Mr. Brewer was Mr. Brewer, and anything less poetic to look at--more impossible as to wands, and wings, and good fairy appendages, it is difficult to imagine. Mr. Brewer was a middle-aged man, with hands in his pockets; plain truth is always respectable. There it is. But there was a Mrs. Brewer. Now Mrs. Brewer was an excellent woman, but not excellent after the manner of her husband. She was three years older. They had not been in love. They had married at an epoch in Mr. Brewer's life when public affairs occupied his time so entirely as to make it desirable to have what people call a "missus;" we are afraid that Mr. Brewer himself so called the article, a "missus, at home." Mrs. Brewer had been "a widow lady--young--of a sociable and domestic disposition" who "desired to be housekeeper--to be treated confidentially, and as one of the family--to a widower--with or without children." On inquiry, it was found that young Mrs. Smith had not irrevocably determined that the owner of the house that she was to keep should have been the husband of one wife, undoubtedly dead; the widower was an expression only, a sort of modest way of putting the plain fact of a single man, or a man capable of matrimony--the expression meant all that; and when Mrs. Smith entered on the housekeeping, she acted up to the meaning of the advertisement, and married Mr. Brewer. Neither had ever repented. Let that be understood. Only, Mr. Brewer, when he knew he could live in a great house, dine off silver, keep a four-in-hand, or a pack of hounds, or enter on any other legitimate mode of spending money, did none of them; but eased his mind and his pocket by such contrivances as we have seen resorted to in the presence of the beautiful Mary Morier. He tried curious experiments of what a man would do with ten pounds. He had dangerous notions as to people addicted to certain villanies being cured of