The other keepers came up at a quick pace, narrowing the half circle in which they had disposed themselves, and penning the gipsy in between their body and the river. He scarcely hastened his pace, but allowed them to come nearer and nearer, till at length his purpose seemed to strike the head keeper suddenly, and, with a loud imprecation, he called upon the man nearest the water to close upon the object of their pursuit, adding, "He is a devil of a swimmer!" But Pharold had been suffered to go too far. He sprang forward at once to the bank, plunged in without a pause, and in a few strokes carried himself to the other side, where, amid thick brushwood and young plantations, he was perfectly secure from all pursuit. CHAPTER III. I know no reason why we--the readers and the writer--should not now quit those characters which have lately been occupying us, and return to others not less worthy of our care, till we have brought their actions and their feelings up to the same point of time whereunto we have conducted our other personages. The best form, perhaps I might say the most classical, in which a tale like the present can be related, with the exception of the autobiographical, is the dramatic; and holding strongly with the liberty accorded to British dramatists against the straight-waistcoat of Aristotelian unities, I believe that he who sits down to write a book like this has as much right to shift his scene and change his characters when he pleases as a playwright. The necessity of so doing exists in the very state of being in which we live in relation to one another. Everyday we find that in five or six families, the actions of each of which have mutually a great influence on the others, events are occurring, and words are being spoken, which bring about great and important results in the general fate and relative position of those five or six families, and, in fact, work out their united history, without one house knowing at the time what was doing in the other. The task, then, of the writer, if he would follow the best of guides, nature, is to take such a group of five or six families, whose fate some common bond of union has linked together; and, changing from house to house as soon as the interest of the events in each requires the scene to be shifted, to paint what he there sees passing; and thus, in a series of pictures, to give the general history of the whole. Stupid must be the man, and impotent the imagination, weak the judgment, and treacherous the memory, which cannot bear the change of scene without a long refresher in regard to the people about to be seen again, or the events of which the writer is once more going to take up the thread!