A second question, however, presents itself at the outset concerning him. Shall I give or conceal his name? I here frankly confess that in its broad details the tale has no novelty to recommend it: it is not only true, but it has been told. The bald, bare facts have been put before the public by the youth himself nearly a hundred years since. There is the rub. To a few ‘persons of culture,’ as the phrase goes nowadays, the main incident of his career will be familiar; though, however cultured, it is unlikely they will know how it affected my great-aunt Margaret; but to tens of thousands (including, I’ll be bound, the upper ten) it will be utterly unknown. Now I have noticed that there is nothing your well-informed person so much delights in as to make other people aware of his being so. Indeed, the chief use of information in his eyes is not so much to raise oneself above the crowd (though a sense of elevation is agreeable), as to have the privilege of imparting it to others with a noble air of superiority and self-importance. I will therefore call my hero by such a name as will at once be recognised by the learned, whom I shall thus render my intermediaries—exponents of the transparent secret to those who are in blissful ignorance of it. I will call him William Henry Erin. I must add in justice to myself that the story was not told me in confidence. How could it be so when at the very beginning of our intimacy the narrator had already almost reached the extreme limit of human life, while I had but just left school? It was the similarity of age on my part with that of the person she had in her mind which no doubt, in part at least, caused her to make me the repository of her long-buried sorrow. She judged, and rightly judged, that for that reason I was more likely to sympathise with it. Indeed, whenever she spoke of it I forgot her age; as in the case of the pictured grandmamma so felicitously described by Mr. Locker, I used to think of her at such times— As she looked at seventeen As a bride. Her rounded form was lean, And her silk was bombazine, Well I wot. With her needles she would sit, And for hours would she knit, Would she not? Ah, perishable clay! Her charms had dropped away, One by one. Yet when she spoke of the lover of her youth, there seemed nothing incongruous in her so doing. I forgot the Long Ago in which her tale was placed; her talk, indeed, on those occasions being of those human feelings which are independent of any epoch, took little or no colour from the past; it seemed to me a story of to-day, and as such I now relate it. CHAPTER II. OUT IN THE COLD. A FEW years ago it would have been almost impossible for modern readers to imagine what a coach journey used to be in the good old times; but, thanks to certain gilded youths, more fortunate than persons of a higher intellectual type who have striven in vain to—