Directly the words were uttered, he perceived their application to the antiquary himself, who was quietly pocketing his own share of the wages of iniquity. But though we have the same skin, it is of various degrees of thickness. ‘He will take it,’ said the other drily, ‘and starve afterwards.’ Notwithstanding this deviation of Mr. Erin’s from the straight path, it is well to state here that Mr. Albany Wallis never consented—although they were his friends and allies—with those who laid the sins of William Henry upon his father’s shoulders. When Bishop Percy, on the authority of the commentator Steevens, observed that the whole house in Norfolk Street was ‘an elaborate workshop,’ Mr. Wallis contradicted the statement point-blank; and when another traducer went the length of including Margaret in the indictment by the assertion that a female relative of Mr. Erin’s performed the more delicate work of the (forged) autographs, he gave him the lie direct. The storm, indeed, that burst upon the heads of the antiquary and his belongings was terrible, and fortunate it was for them that they had found an asylum afar off. Most of the ‘hailstones and coals of fire’ fell short of it; and those that reached them, through the malice of enemies or the officiousness of good-natured friends, were fended off from the old man by Margaret’s watchful care. Upon the whole, indeed, it is doubtful whether those seemingly evil days were not good for her. Her solicitude upon her uncle’s account prevented her from dwelling over much upon her private grief, just as the heartbreak of the widower is sometimes stayed by the cry of the children. It was many a day, however, before she could look her own misfortune in the face, and scrutinise its lineaments, for when we come to gauge our sorrows it is a sign that the deep waters that have gone over our soul have begun to shallow. Notwithstanding her horror of her Willie’s crime, she could not forget what he had once been to her, even though she was well aware, from a sure source, that matters were not so with him. Mrs. Jordan had written to her, out of the fulness of one of the kindest hearts that ever beat in woman’s breast, to allay her apprehensions about him on material grounds. Though poor enough, he was not in want, nor likely to be so. Without a word of ill-nature, she had also contrived to make her understand that the boy was not inconsolable; he was busy with his pen, and if his genius did not soar, his conceit was upborne on lusty pinions. ‘All is Vanity,’ said the preacher in disparagement of that attribute; yet he was an author himself, and ought to have known the consolation of such a gift.