of money, begged him to be quiet at any rate till the fate of the property should be settled. "And if you'll take my advice, Sir John, you will not notice him at all. You may be sure that he has not a shilling in the world, and that he wants you to prosecute him. When you have got damages against him, he will be off out of the country." "But I shall have stopped his impudent ribaldry," said Sir John Ball. Then the lawyer tried to explain to him that no one read the ribaldry. It was of no use. Sir John read it himself, and that was enough to make him wretched. The little fable which made Sir John so unhappy had not, for some months past, appeared in any of the metropolitan newspapers; but when the legal inquiry into the proper disposition of Mr Jonathan Ball's property was over, and when it was known that, as the result of that inquiry, the will in favour of the Mackenzies was to be set aside and the remains of the property handed over to Sir John, then that very influential newspaper, which in the early days of the question had told the story of the Lion and the Lamb, told it all again, tearing, indeed, the Littlebath _Christian Examiner_ into shreds for its iniquity, but speaking of the romantic misfortune of the lamb in terms which made Sir John Ball very unhappy. The fame which accrued to him from being so publicly pointed out as a lion, was not fame of which he was proud. And when the writer in this very influential newspaper went on to say that the world was now looking for a termination of this wonderful story, which would make it pleasant to all parties, he was nearly beside himself in his misery. He, a man of fifty, of slow habits, with none of the buoyancy of youth left in him, apt to regard himself as older than his age, who had lived with his father and mother almost on an equality in regard to habits of life, the father of a large family, of which the eldest was now himself a man! Could it be endured that such a one as he should enter upon matrimony amidst the din of public trumpets and under a halo of romance? The idea of it was frightful to him. On the very day on which the result of the legal investigation was officially communicated to him, he sat in the old study at the Cedars with two newspapers before him. In one of these there was a description of his love, which he knew was intended as furtive ridicule, and an assurance to the public that the lamb's misfortunes would all be remedied by the sweet music of the marriage bell. What right had any one to assert publicly that he intended to marry any one? In his wretchedness and anger he would have indicted this newspaper also for a libel, had not his lawyer assured him that, according to law, there was no libel in stating that a man was going to be married. The other paper accused him of rapacity and dishonesty in that he would not marry the lamb, now that he had secured the lamb's fleece; so that, in truth, he had no escape on either side; for Mr Maguire, having