again betook themselves to hard drinking. In a short time the liquor began to tell, not first, as might be supposed, on our younger men, who were mostly tall, vigorous fellows, in the first flush of their full strength, but on a few of the middle-aged workmen, whose constitutions seemed undermined by a previous course of dissipation and debauchery. The conversation became very loud, very involved, and, though highly seasoned with emphatic oaths, very insipid; and leaving with Cha--who seemed somewhat uneasy that my eye should be upon their meeting in its hour of weakness--money enough to clear off my share of the reckoning, I stole out to the King's Park, and passed an hour to better purpose among the trap rocks than I could possibly have spent it beside the trap-door. Of that tavern party, I am not aware that a single individual save the writer is now living: its very dog did not live out half his days. His owner was alarmed one morning, shortly after this time, by the intelligence that a dozen of sheep had been worried during the night on a neighbouring farm, and that a dog very like his had been seen prowling about the fold; but in order to determine the point, he would be visited, it was added, in the course of the day, by the shepherd and a law-officer. The dog meanwhile, however, conscious of guilt--for dogs do seem to have consciences in such matters--was nowhere to be found, though, after the lapse of nearly a week, he again appeared at the work; and his master, slipping a rope round his neck, brought him to a deserted coal-pit half-filled with water, that opened in an adjacent field, and, flinging him in, left the authorities no clue by which to establish his identity with the robber and assassin of the fold.