able start of improvement. Colonel Peeche removed to a more aristocratic part of the city of Dublin, and set up an equipage. Captain Algernon Peeche found his way to a majority, and Lieutenant and Acting Quatermaster Percival Peeche purchased his company. All this showed Lieutenant Peeche to be a very dutiful fellow to his real relations, and to have a proper feeling towards his wife, as she, being the daughter of a coalmaster, and of inferior rank to him, was therefore to be pigeoned in the game of marriage, just as her upstart father would have been rightly served in the game of écarté.

He also showed a strong disinclination to take upon him the active conduct of the business. This arose partly from dislike to any employment except the toil fools call the pursuit of pleasure, partly from want of sufficient education (for carving, dancing, and gallantry, are hardly enough of that for the counting-house), but mostly from lack of adequate intellect. He was great, however, with the horse, dog, and gun, and soon became a perfect sportsman, leaving that vast business which supported him in splendour, and enriched his connexions, with all its cares, speculations, and immense correspondence, to the management of his wife, and whomsoever of the numerous underlings connected with it she chose to call to her aid. He gave many and splendid dinners moreover, and the eating and drinking gentry of the neighbourhood began to flock around, while his house was always free as the barrack to "ours."

But it was not many months before Mrs. Peeche began heartily to repent of her bargain. The warmth of her love for his pretty face and figure evaporated. It was a merely animal passion, and as such departed with its gratification, and she began to regard with satiety and disgust that beauty which had erewhile so captivated her. She found him not only idiotically ignorant on all useful subjects, but contented with his ignorance, and disposed to mock with an inane ridicule any show of knowledge or talent, she or others might happen to display. On all matters that required judgment or information, or the application of thought for any time, he was utterly helpless, while at the same time he entertained neither respect for the talented, nor gratitude for the assistance they might yield.

Moreover, he had never loved her; he had not mind enough for that passion; he had all along regarded her, as we have said before, merely as a pigeon to be plucked by him in the game of matrimony-as a prize for himself and his family. As time went on he did not scruple to tell her this. Before the first year of their marriage was over he had become to her an object of contempt, a detested burden, a dreaded torment.

When she began first to see him, as the gloss of prettiness of person and of heroic scarlet faded from him, an ignorant and tyrannical fool, she could not but institute a comparison between him and that other, who she believed loved her with his whole soul, and was now suffering the pangs of disappointment-the all-gifted and able Edmund Vaspar. Disgusted with the beggarly aristocracy of the colonel's son, she saw a true and high nobility in the genius of the young plebeian; tired of the stolid beauty of the one, her admiration flew to the quick eye and sharp dark features that spoke the active intellect of the other. Worried to death with the yawning ennui, the lisped affectation, the stupid and often indecent slang of the stable and dog-kennel, she pined for the low-pitched

and thrilling voice, the musical sentences and glowing ideas, of her former humble lover-for his exhaustless information on all topics, his dauntless talent, equal to every effort, and his indefatigable business ability, which no labour could tire, no difficulties dispirit.

Edmund could not but look upon his rival with a contempt which envy at his success elevated into fierce detestation, and as he sat day by day in his small wood-partitioned counting-room in the truck store, so intense became this hatred, so complete his despair of advancement, that he meditated the infliction upon him of some grievous bodily harm. It was to sound his brother, who had the power to effect this he well knew with ease and certainty, that he paid him the visit we have detailed.

But as time wore on, when he saw the feeling growing up between the pair, when he marked it with his whole soul, as alive to it as the ear of a criminal to his sentence, then did his spirits mount again to more than their former level, and he set his active wits to work with all their pristine energy.

It was not long after the marriage till he was recalled, to lend his aid in the chief conduct of the business of his new master. The latter saw him, surveyed him carelessly-would have done it with an eye-glass had such a thing been in fashion then-and on being informed that his skill and ability were indispensable, gave his consent to his being placed in the situation of chief confidential clerk, and turning to an eminent ratcatcher who was with him at the time, began to converse about the state of the stables in regard to vermin.

Edmund was now continually about the person of Mrs. Peeche, appearing before her in his best light, and exerting upon her all his powers of fascination, and they were many. His object was to lead her to crime, partly for his own advantage, to have her completely in his power, partly from revenge; for, from the first time she had unfeelingly laughed at his early blunders, he had cherished against her a vindictive feeling, which his late disappointment, and the secondary misery it besides had bred for him, had certainly not put to rest. And the whole of this love then was acted-it had been all along a deception for the purpose of ambition and revenge. We cannot deny that her beauty, which was considerable, had made some impression upon him, but it was decidedly not that of love.

It is hard to imagine one seducing a woman out of pure animosity; but when you reflect that in seduction it is the woman's ruin that is sought, you will be able at once to unravel the paradox. No one could be better fitted for such a course of proceeding than Edmund-totally unprincipled as he was capable of keeping a great bad purpose constantly before his mind, and of bringing great powers to bear upon its furtherance-possessed also of a knowledge of mankind, infinitely greater than might have been expected from his opportunities. All the resources of extensive reading in poetry and romance, in mental philosophy, and in the great book of nature, he brought to his aid-every scheme of attraction every winning artifice he could think of, he practised upon her, till the poor lady looked upon his company as a relief-a refuge a heavenand cursed her folly in choosing the glittering ass, from whose society she now fled to his, as she would from a lazar-house to a bower in Tempe.

In a short time he was successful, she became completely his, and doted on him with an admiration, a devotion, and a joy, which she felt was truly love, and as different even from the regard she had formerly entertained for her husband, as it again was from the contempt in which she held him now.

But all this was totally unsuspected even by the menials of the house, a set of people who generally are the first perceptive of such affairs. Edmund was too sagacious to allow it to be in the slightest degree evident, and while he had the wife so completely in his power, he was finding his way rapidly into the good graces of her husband. By an exceedingly distant and deferential deportment in his presence, by numerous flatteries-well disguised and skilfully administered-and by a well-acted devotion to his interests, he in a short time succeeded in gaining his entire good-will, and unquestioning obedience to every suggestion in matters connected with the business. And this fact, whereat he made very merry in private with Mrs. Peeche, only sunk her husband a degree still lower in her contempt.

But while he was thus managing his master and mistress, he did not forget his brother Mark, and during his leisure moments concocted a scheme, which he thought would make his fall sudden and complete. This was to organise a counter-combination among the masters, one of whose measures was to be a sudden and simultaneous dismissal of all their men, at a moment previously agreed upon in secret, and the importation from the mining districts of Scotland, by their collier-vessels, of a colony of new workmen, who would be content with lower wages, and being strangers and nobs, and detested by the former labourers, would not be likely, at least for years, to join in any general union.

This he explained to Mr. Peeche, directing him to unfold it to the other proprietors, and get as many of them to join in it as possible.

Now at this time, Mark Vaspar, by some insolent and exorbitant demand had strongly excited the masters against him, though they were powerless to avoid complying with it. They were therefore prepared to receive with avidity, such a scheme as that invented by Edmund, and when, at a dinner given at his house to about a dozen of them, Peeche proposed it, taking the merit of it entirely to himself, he found them disposed both at once to embrace it, and to give him credit for more capacity than they had ever before placed to his account. But Edmund on hearing that he had thus exposed the scheme in public, before numerous servants, most of them belonging to the mining class, and some of whom he knew, and others suspected to be, members of Mark's confederacy, while he cursed his unguarded folly, could not help congratulating himself on his vanity, which had led him to claim the whole authorship.

Within an hour after the proposal had been broached, and while they were yet over their wine, Mark Vaspar had got possession of the whole affair, and had taken his measures. But before you find out what they were, let us return to Edmund and Mrs. Peeche.

It is difficult for an author to allude decorously to such a connexion, for the odium attached to guilty love, the difficulties, its transient and precarious nature, the thought that for it all the pleasures and comforts of family and of society are put in jeopardy, that by yielding to it, the consciousness of honour and fair virtue is for ever gone-and the fact,

that to brave this, the passion, bad as it is, must be of extremest strength -all these make the poor heart cling to it with double fondness, and give it a sweetness exquisite, though delusive and mortal, like the fragrance of the poison-laurel. Poetic justice demands that sin should not in our pages wear an enticing aspect, but if the romancer is to copy truth he cannot but represent that "stolen water is sweet," and while he paints the loss for aye of self-respect, the terror of discovery and dishonour, the gnawing of conscience, and all other miseries attendant on the love we allude to, that make the mind a very place of torment, he can hardly paint them in more vivid colours than the deep delight for which they are encountered.

We have mentioned that Mrs. Peeche was a woman of considerable intellect. She possessed a mind fully capable of entertaining the passion of love in its strongest intensity and most perfect refinement-that love which is perceptive of beauty of soul alone, taking that of body but as a secondary consideration, though it may afterwards, by fancy's aid, gild up the latter to something like a proper material image of the former-that love in which the spirit of the object is the thing truly loved, and which is the only love that can be immortal. And with this, an emotion, such as only minds of a high order and much cultivation are capable of feeling or appreciating, she loved her paramour; and with the same fervour wherewith she loved him, she ahhorred her husband, and would talk to Edmund of him in a manner that often startled even him.

About two miles to the rear of her house was a large wood, which being enclosed within a round bend of a river, had no regular path through or even near it, and was quite unfrequented. It was very rocky, and thick with brushwood; and in different parts of it were the mouths of one or two old coal-mines, long ago disused or wrought out. One of these had the engine-house, a little turreted building, still standing, covered with ivy, and topped with waving bushes. The mounds of coaldust or other rubbish, had been converted into grassy knolls, overgrown with bramble, wild brier, and dog-rose, and in the midst gaped the black mouth of the pit. This one had been filled up to within about thirty feet of the upper surface, in which state it had been left with its brim overhung with bushes, and its new bottom formed of mud, moss-weeds, sticks, fallen leaves, and the like. The spot was completely surrounded by wood, and was approached by an old wheel-track that wound among the trees. Nothing could be more sequestered. The only creatures to be seen near it by day might be a party of children, gathering nuts or wild berries, or by night, the slouching, stealthy figure of a poacher.

At twilight, or early night, this was a favourite haunt of Edmund and Mrs. Peeche, for a scarcely traceable path from it through the wood, opened into the rear of the park in which the house stood, and about different parts of this park she had always been accustomed to take a morning or evening walk. Here they were wont to find unbroken solitude, green foliage, a balmy atmosphere, the nightingale's music, and the soft gloaming of the summer-time, with all the other charms that act as accompaniments to love, and make its sweetness come flower-scented to the heart. And such was the chosen scene of their guilty joy.

On the evening of the third or fourth day after Peeche's proposal to the masters, they were here as usual, and as they sat by each other on one of

the green knolls, in the warm converse of unlawful passion, they were startled by groans, and a voice calling faintly for help from out the old pit whose murky mouth yawned beside them.

On the first alarm they sprang to their feet, and she, starting from his side, would have fled through the wood. But on a moment's reassurance of themselves, they stood still, whispering, pausing, and listening again, and then silently approaching the mouth of the mine, they parted the bushes, and cautiously looked down. They saw the body of a man laid at the bottom among some rotten brushwood, sticks, and leaves. Presently looking up as he heard the rustling of the bushes and catching view of their heads

"Mercy, good people-help me, I am dying," he said.

"Gracious God, Edmund-it's he-Peeche-my husband!" she exclaimed, in a quick, thrilling whisper, catching her paramour by the arm with a hand that trembled as it clutched. "Three days ago he went over to Haverfield to shoot-he has not been home since-Great Providence, is it come to this at last!”

"Hold back now, Joan, dearest-hush, let me speak to him." Then going close to the brink, and stooping over to look down, "Is that Mr. Peeche?" he asked.

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Vaspar! thank God! help me out of this, Vaspar; lose not a moment, for love of mercy-I am dying-I have tasted nothing for three days."

Here he convulsively caught a handful of the wet leaves, among which he lay, and pressed them to his mouth, chewing a portion. This made his voice much more strong and distinct.

"Oh, Vaspar, have you no food near you to throw me down a morsel -oh, for Heaven's sake! lose no time."

"How do you come to be there, sir? Did you fall in ?"

"Oh-no, no-I was thrown down here by ruffians—the miners, headed by your brother, the agent. They attacked me, brought me here, and he with his own hands put me down."

In a

Here Edmund drew slightly back from the brink, and remained for a space motionless in thought, whilst the wife stood beside looking eagerly at him, as if anxious to read in his countenance his thoughts of their situation, and intentions as to her husband; but a vast tumult of new thoughts and schemes were rising, taking form, heaving upon each other, mingling and rolling in his mind, like smoke-volumes in a crater. minute he had resolved upon a course of conduct to pursue. The leaving of Peeche to his fate was the principal point of it, but he desired that between himself and her it should appear that the measure was entirely of her suggestion. This was that he might have a strong hold on her for ever after, and in any dispute between them shake himself clear of the guilt, and throw it entirely upon her.

"Had I not better go to the house, and get the servants with ropes?" said he.

"Never!" cried she, with fierce emotion. "What, would you tie me again to a hated torment thus by lucky chance cut from me. Fool, don't you see he is here being murdered-we have not done it—we are powerless of means to help-can we be blamed?-no other creature will come near-he must soon die. We can keep our secret, or even should it come out, what can they do to us?—what have we done?—nothing! Then