"I know I have a whole packet of letters in Matthew's own hand amongst my grandmother's papers," said Miss Judson. "I was a great favourite with my grandmother, and used to spend a good deal of my time with her before she died—which she did while I was in pinafores; but young people wore pinafores much longer in my time than they do now; and I was getting on for fourteen years of age when my grandmother departed this life. I've often heard her talk of her brother Matthew, who had been dead some years when I was born. She was very fond of him, and he of her, I've heard her say; and she used often to tell me how handsome he was in his youth; and how well he used to look in a chocolate and gold-laced riding coat, just after the victory of Culloden, when he came to Ullerton in secret, to pay her a visit—not being on friendly terms with his father."

I asked Miss Judson if she had ever read Matthew Haygarth's letters.

"No," she said; "I look at them sometimes when I'm tidying the drawer in which I keep them, and I have sometimes stopped to read a word here and there, but no more. I keep them out of respect to the dead; but I think it would make me unhappy to read them. The thoughts and the feelings in old letters seem so fresh that they bring our poor mortality too closely home to us when we remember how little except those faded letters remains of those who wrote them. It is well for us to remember that we are only travellers and wayfarers on this earth; but sometimes it seems just a little hard to think how few traces of our footsteps we leave behind us when the journey is finished."

The canaries seemed to answer Miss Judson with a feeble twitter of assent: and I took my leave, with a feeling of compassion in my heart. I, the scamp—I, Robert Macaire the younger—had pity upon the caged canaries, and the lonely old woman whose narrow life was drawing to its close, and who began to feel how very poor a thing it had been after all.

Oct. 11th. I have paid the penalty of my temerity in enduring the vault-like chilliness of Miss Hephzibah Judson's parlour, and am suffering to-day from a sharp attack of influenza; that complaint which of all others tends to render a man a burden to himself, and a nuisance to his fellow-creatures. Under these circumstances I have ordered a fire in my own room—a personal indulgence scarcely warranted by Sheldon's stipend—and I sit by my own fire pondering over the story of Matthew Haygarth's life.