To end a sorrowful story as speedily as possible, it remains but to say, that when poor Davy got out of gaol he found his wife and her children nearly starving and in rags, and living in a scanty, down-coming cottage, not half the size of that wherein his father and mother had lived so many years in contentment and prosperity—his house was not only entirely gone, but his van and horses were sold, and his business had passed, months before, into the hands of an industrious stranger. Penniless, sick, and wretched, poor Davy Lidgitt was compelled to apply to the parish for bread, and he had no alternative but to obey their direction, and break stones on the road! He was beheld in that employ for many years after—a fallen, broken-spirited man;—and often would the aged women observe to each other,—as they passed him by to work in the fields, and remembered Tom Cussitt's prophecy, to which Davy's father would so often recur in his neighbours' hearing,—"So much for the man who hath brought his ninepence to nought!" THE FISHERMAN AND THE FIDDLER; OR, "DON'T SAY SO TILL YOU ARE SURE." It is a long day since Zed Marrowby and Phil Garrett passed quietly away from this wilderness of confusion and wrong, and their names are well-nigh forgotten. But they were, each of them, so unlike other folk in their way of life, and in their old-fashioned habits of thinking and talking, that there is no wonder they have slipped out of the world's memory as well as out of the world itself. Two odd old fellows they were deemed for many a year, albeit there are few happier old fellows, upon the whole, than they were. And who were they? Zed was an humble fishermen on the Trent, and never knew what it was to be possessed, at once, of twenty shillings in his life. His father was called Zedekiah, but the son never reached that long-name dignity. Zed was taught the art and mystery of fishing with an angle, fishing with set lines and hooks, fishing with nets—in brief, all kinds of fresh-water fishing, when a boy, by his father,—whose father and grandfather before him were each and all fishermen. Zed was a bachelor all his life long, and that means fourscore and five; and Zed never had but one bosom-friend, and that was blind Phil Garrett the fiddler.