companies: though it must be owned that they had been, as the phrase is, "let off easily." But I must not disguise from the reader that the Artificial Rain Company was not the only one with which these distinguished individuals, together with Lord Dreddlington, had become connected--there was the Gunpowder and Fresh Water Company, of which Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap, were the solicitors--but _sufficient for the day is the evil thereof_; and let it suffice for the present to say, that some short time afterwards, the Duke of Tantallan, on the part of the Earl of Dreddlington, paid down the sum of £10,000 on account of the above-mentioned sum of £18,000, the remainder of which was to be called for in six months' time. Mr. Gammon, however, could not think of the possibility of the Gunpowder Company's explosion without a shudder, on account of the dreadful extent to which Lord Dreddlington was implicated, and from which Gammon feared that there really were no means of extricating him. What would he have given never to have seduced the earl into embarking into any such speculations? Nay, what would he not have given, never to have set eyes upon either the Earl of Dreddlington or the Lady Cecilia? What advantage had he ever gained, after all, by his desperate grasp after aristocratic connection? If, however, the earl should prove really and permanently insane, what a godsend would such an event be, in every point of view, to Gammon--silencing forever the chief sufferer and witness--and saving Gammon from all the endless vexations and anxieties arising out of personal explanations and collisions with the man, whom he had drawn into the vortex of pecuniary ruin--shielding Gammon, in short, from a world of reproaches and execrations.