this; the thought became oppressively dominant. They began at first to hint at it, they ended, quite quickly too, in predicting it with mutual confessions of dismay. Both loved Miss Tobit, yet, as far as appearances went, only the guardian spirit of her dreams could have told the direction of her inclinations. Perhaps both seemed to her too dear, too much involved in the one peril with herself, to stand apart from each other in any guise or place of preference. Thomsen was the younger man, and he had the advantage of a handsome face, a fine form and a particularly deferential tenderness. Cupid and his mother are not slow to give such gifts their heartiest commendation. But Thomsen was generous to his somewhat reticent, and, probably not greatly feared rival, the prowess of beauty is generally undaunted and oftentimes magnanimous. When the worst hardships of their journey were over, and in the less afflicted regions of England, where at the time the snow falls were not as deep, or the winds as tempestuous, Leacraft had many chances to talk with Miss Tobit, and he found her extremely affable, well informed and sympathetic, certainly not endowed with the mischievous drollery and the roguish merriment of Miss Garrett, and therefore not so piquant, tantalizing, and desirable, but very kindly and soothing. The provost-marshal and most of the party went to Liverpool, whither, before, many of the inhabitants of Edinburgh had fled, but Leacraft and Thomsen kept on to London. They found conditions in London full of fright and trepidation, and the business interests floundering and collapsed. Leacraft took up his headquarters at the Bothwell Club, and Thomsen and his cousin found a home at a maiden aunt’s, in Claverhouse place. But much as Leacraft would have craved an indulgence of sympathy and response, the audience of sense and appreciation, and the agreeable picture before his eyes of acquiescent if not admiring beauty, the fatal progress of events in the world of England kept him away from Miss Tobit more than he wished. These events were far from reassuring; they were directly and successively catastrophic. Their logic seemed inexorable; and Europe became rigid with attention as it watched with most varying feelings of commiseration the tightening grasp of frost and snow, wind and tempest, upon the destiny of England. Not that an actual submergence beneath snowdrifts was threatened, a hyperboreal sepulchre under which every Englishman lay, like the Excelsior youth, “lifeless but beautiful.”