the mud or the flinty pavement till I had been forgiven, and reinstated in my rank--ah, how loathsome that must have been to her! Ah, how loathsome the whole cycle of favours were to me, considering from whom they came! Then we had effectually plagued each other. And it was not without loud laughter, as of malice unexpectedly triumphant, that I found one night thirty years after, on regretting my powerlessness of vengeance, that, in fact, I had amply triumphed thirty years before. So, undaunted Mrs. Evans, if you live anywhere within call, listen to the assurance that all accounts are squared between us, and that we balanced our mutual debts by mutual disgust; and that, if you plagued me perversely, I plagued you unconsciously. And though shot and bullets were forbidden fruit, yet something might be done with hard wadding. A good deal of classical literature disappeared in this way, which by one who valued no classics very highly might be called the way of all flesh. The best of authors, he contended, had better perish by this warlike consummation than by the inglorious enmity of bookworms and moths--honeycombed, as most of the books had been which had gone out to India with our two uncles. Even wadding, however, was declared to be inadmissible as too dangerous, after wounds had been inflicted more than once. 3.--A LAWSUIT LEGACY. De Quincey, in his autobiographic sketch headed 'Laxton,' tells of the fortune of Miss Watson, who afterwards became Lady Carbery, and also of the legacy left to her in the form of a lawsuit by her father against the East India Company; and among his papers we find the following passage either overlooked or omitted, for some undiscoverable reason, from that paper, though it has a value in its own way as expressing some of De Quincey's views on law and equity; and it is sufficiently characteristic to be included here: In consequence of her long minority, Miss Watson must have succeeded at once to six thousand a year on completing her twenty-first year; and she also inherited a Chancery-suit, which sort of property is _now_ (1853) rather at a discount in public estimation; but let the reader assure himself that even the Court of Chancery is not quite so black as it is painted; that the true ground for the delays and ruinous expenses in ninety-nine out of one hundred instances is not legal chicanery, still less the wilful circuitousness and wordiness of law processes, but the great eternal fact that, what through lapse of time, decays of memory, and loss of documents, and what through interested suppressions of truth, and the dispersions of witnesses, and causes by the score beside, the ultimate truth and equity of human disputes is a matter of prodigious perplexity; neither is there any possibility that the mass of litigations as to property ever _can_ be made cheap except in proportion as it is made dismally imperfect.