If the riddle be not already guessed, a few words will explain the simple machinery by which this coming event was made to cast its shadow before. Three men had plotted the robbery and murder of Mr. Higginbotham; two of them successively lost courage and fled, each delaying the crime one night by their disappearance; the third was in the act of perpetration when a champion, blindly obeying the call of fate, like the heroes of old romance, appeared in the person of Dominicus Pike. It only remains to say that Mr. Higginbotham took the pedler into high favour, sanctioned his addresses to the pretty school-mistress, and settled his whole property on their children, allowing themselves the interest. In due time the old gentleman capped the climax of his favours by dying a Christian death, in bed, since which melancholy event Dominicus Pike has removed from Kimballton and established a large tobacco factory in my native village. _Nathaniel Hawthorne._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _GOING TO CALIFORNIA._ “DEAR me!” exclaimed Mrs. Partington sorrowfully, “how much a man will bear, and how far he will go, to get the soddered dross, as Parson Martin called it when he refused the beggar a sixpence, for fear it might lead him into extravagance! Everybody is going to California and Chagrin arter gold. Cousin Jones and the three Smiths have gone; and Mr. Chip, the carpenter, has left his wife and seven children, and a blessed old mother-in-law, to seek his fortin, too. This is the strangest yet, and I don’t see how he could have done it; it looks so ongrateful to treat Heaven’s blessings so lightly. But there we are told that the love of money is the root of all evil, and how true it is! for they are now rooting arter it, like pigs arter ground-nuts. Why, it is a perfect money mania among everybody!” [Illustration: “AS SHE PENSIVELY WATCHED A SMALL MUG OF CIDER.”] And she shook her head doubtingly, as she pensively watched a small mug of cider, with an apple in it, simmering by the winter fire. She was somewhat fond of drink made in this way. _Benjamin Penhallon Shillaber_ (“_Mrs. Partington_”). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ “_ROUGHING IT._”