"I will tell you, neighbour; but I have one thing more to say about this enemy--I have great reason to believe that he is doing a good deal to shorten your life." "You don't say that, sir!" cried the poor man, with some signs of alarm. "But now you speak of it," he continued, "I have felt sometimes as if I was being poisoned." "Ah, no doubt. Well, that was your enemy's doing. And not to make a longer story of it, the man I am speaking of has destroyed every chance you ever had of getting on--and you have had chances--he has upset your poor old wife's temper, and urged her on to give you so much tongue, as you say." "I can't think who you can mean, or what you are talking about, sir," said my old neighbour, ponderingly. "The name of the man who has done you all this mischief is Edward Bean, commonly called Tipsy Ned. Do you know him?" For a moment or two poor Ned did not speak, but sat looking at me savagely. Then the muscles of his face worked convulsively, and his eyes were slowly withdrawn from my face, and looked down on the prison floor. Then he muttered, "I reckon you are right, sir." I knelt down and prayed with and for my poor old neighbour before I left the jail; and that was the last I saw of him. He was soon afterwards tried, and condemned to six months' imprisonment for the assault on his wife, but he did not live out the term. His constitution was shattered by previous habits. He was taken ill, and died in the infirmary of the county prison. The circumstances I have related have nearly passed from the memory of those in the village where he once lived; but I have revived the story, "to point a moral," though it may not "adorn a tale." IV. ABOUT SCOLDING. "I'd go and break stones on the road rather than be sitting indoors doing nothing, Will," I heard Mrs. Howland say as I was walking up to the cottage door. The words were spoken sharply, and the tone was in a high pitch. "Ho, ho," thought I, "if the wind is in that quarter, perhaps I had better make my call at another time;" and I hesitated for a moment. But as I really had some business with William Howland, and as I had got so far, I made up my mind not to turn back. William Howland is a good man, I verily believe; but I am bound (if I must speak out) to say that he is not--well, not to write too strongly--not over fond of hard work. He has a wife and family dependent on his exertions, and he had recently, two or three weeks previous to this call of mine, lost a place of regular employment, fifteen shillings a week wages, because he could not or would not get up soon enough in the morning. The case was this. He had, three months before (after a good deal of knocking about, sometimes in work, and rather oftener out of it), applied to a neighbouring farmer for a situation then vacant on the farm.