addressed to Gotobed an exceedingly plausible, business-like letter. "The firm he had entered, in the silk trade, was in the most flourishing state--an opportunity occurred to purchase a magnificent mulberry plantation in Provence, with all requisite magnanneries, &c., which would yield an immense increase of profit. That if, to insure him a share in this lucrative purchase, Mr. Darrell could accommodate him for a year with a loan of L2,000 or L3,000, he sanguinely calculated on attaining so high a position in the commercial world as, though it could not render the recollection of his alliance more obtrusive to Mr. Darrell, would render it less humiliating." Mr. Gotobed, in obedience to the peremptory instructions he had received from his client, did not refer this letter to Darrell, but having occasion at that time to visit Paris on other business, he resolved (without calling on Mr. Hammond) to institute there some private inquiry- into that rising trader's prospects and status. He found, on arrival at Paris, these inquiries difficult. No one in either the /beau monde/ or in the /haut commerce/ seemed to know anything about this Mr. Jasper Hammond. A few fashionable English /roues/ remembered to have seen, once or twice during Matilda's life, and shortly after her decease, a very fine-looking man shooting meteoric across some equivocal /salons/, or lounging in the Champs Elysees, or dining at the Cafe de Paris; but of late that meteor had vanished. Mr. Gotobed, then anxiously employing a commissioner to gain some information of Mr. Hammond's firm at the private residence from which Jasper addressed his letter, ascertained that in that private residence Jasper did not reside. He paid the porter to receive occasional letters, for which he called or sent; and the porter, who was evidently a faithful and discreet functionary, declared his belief that Monsieur Hammond lodged in the house in which he transacted business, though where was the house or what was the business, the porter observed, with well-bred implied rebuke, "Monsieur Hammond was too reserved to communicate, he himself too incurious to inquire." At length, Mr. Gotobed's business, which was, in fact, a commission from a distressed father to extricate an imprudent son, a mere boy, from some unhappy associations, having brought him into the necessity of seeing persons who belonged neither to the /beau monde/ nor to the /haut commerce/, he gleaned from them the information he desired. Mr. Hammond lived in the very heart of a certain circle in Paris, which but few Englishmen ever penetrate. In that circle Mr. Hammond had, on receiving his late wife's dowry, become the partner in a private gambling hell; in that hell had been engulfed all the monies he had received--a hell that ought to have prospered with him, if he could have economised his villanous gains. His senior partner in that firm retired into the country with a fine fortune--no doubt the very owner of those mulberry