an early opportunity of visiting Mrs. Grace, being anxious to see the Farquhars, and also to apologize for the liberty she had taken in sending Mrs. Lilly to nurse the invalid. If Mr. Spread had been fascinated by the young widow, Mrs. Spread was still more taken with her. She was very young, to all appearance scarcely twenty, not handsome, yet very engaging; singularly modest and gentle, yet at the same time discharging all her duties, both as governess and as mistress of the house, in the absence of Mrs. Farquhar, with a discretion and a quiet firmness which, as Mr. Spread observed, would have been remarkable in a matron of twice her standing in the world. Far from being offended at the installation of the good Mrs. Lilly, it 1 gave the little widow the liveliest satisfaction; there was so much to be done, particulary in attendance on a gentleman and a bachelor, which Mrs. Grace could only do by proxy, or could do but very imperfectly, without neglecting her other duties. In short, Mrs. Spread was in raptures with her new acquaintance, and wrote to her sister the next day, expressly to let her know how fortunate she had been in the choice of such a governess for her children.

The Bedford family were almost as assiduous as the Spreads in their attentions to Mr. Barker. When the dean was awake, he was always speaking of him, and longing for the period to arrive when it would be proper to fit out a barge, under the command of Mr. Mooney, his butler, and send it across the stream with a cargo of claret and burgundy, for he thought, after so much water, a little wine would do the bachelor no harm. The boat was repaired, and Mooney made the voyage from Far Niente to the cottage and back again twice a-day, to report the progress of the patient and the latest opinion of the faculty. Mooney was no light cargo himself for a Thames wherry, and had his voyages been round the world, he could not have set out upon them with more importance, or returned with more éclat. The dean was never easy until he set out, and then he was never easy until he came back. Mooney was a great man in his sphere, and almost as great a pluralist as his master. His largest benefice was his butlership; but he held several other little preferments, all the nicer and snugger for being Irish ones. He was verger of the cathedral church of St. Ormond, parish-clerk of Desert, in Tipperary, and sexton of Burnchurch, in the county of Cavan. All these faculties he bore with surprising meekness, except in the servants' hall, where he was a far greater dignitary than the dean himself, drank his port like a prelate, and laid down the ecclesiastical law like Dr. Lushington.

Mr. Spread had great difficulty in making Barker tolerably amenable

H

to his medical advisers. The bachelor pronounced Chambers a quack, and Brodie a mountebank. Mr. Squills, the apothecary, he said, had more skill in his little finger than all the London doctors put together. The public is generally right,” said Mr. Spread.

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The public is generally wrong," rejoined the sick bachelor. "Efficaci do manus scientiæ," said Spread.

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• What can any man know of the interior of my frame?" growled the patient.

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Physicians must know more about it than either you or I, Barker!" "They either do or they do not," replied the bachelor, couching his sophistry in the form of his favorite dilemma. If they do, they should be able to cure all manner of disorders-there ought to be no such thing as a disease left in the world; if they do not, they prescribe in the dark-the system is downright humbug."

Still, experience is something," said Spread, soothingly.

"But they have none, or not half as much as their patients. Plato observes very justly, that a physician ought himself to have gone through all the distempers he professes to heal. Was Brodie ever half-drowned as I was?"

"But tell me," said Spread, anxious to avoid further argument, "tell me, Barker, do you recollect your sensations when you were under the water!"

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life."

Perfectly I never passed a pleasanter quarter of an hour in my

Spread laughed, rose from the bed-side, carefully avoided counseling the bachelor either to do, or not to do any thing-(a discretion which people in general would do well to imitate, when they have cross-grained characters to deal with)—and rejoined his wife and his daughter Augusta, on the little lawn, between the cottage and the river; they had been anxious to see Mrs. Grace; but the pretty widow did not appear, to the great disappointment of Mrs. Spread. Indeed, it almost always happened, when the Spreads came over to Mrs. Farquhar's, that the young gouvernante was either not at home or so deeply engaged with her pupils or in her household affairs, as to be unable to receive them in person.

As to Philip, smitten as he was by Grace Medlicott, he was indifferent to all other women in the world. It was nothing to him whether the governess of his aunt's children was a wife or a widow, a maid or a matron, a beauty or a fright. He heard his mother and. sisters highly commending some body of the feminine gender, but he never inquired who was the subject of their praises, and if he even heard her name, it went in at one ear only to go out at the other,

CHAPTER XXI.

You may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flower of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain, but no receipt openeth the heart but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession.

BACON'S Essay on Friendship.

Barker imitates Molière-A Session of the Court of Conscience-How the Bachelor tormented himself-Barker takes the Advice of a wise Man, and is much the better for it-Troubles of Mrs. Lilly-Her Interview with Mrs. Grace-Mrs. Lilly receives a Picture and undertakes a Commission-The Bachelor miserable again-How the Cuckoos and Swallows plagued him.

AFTER about a week's slow but steady progress, Barker had a relapse. He was too much given to collisions to "turn the corner" without knocking against it. Mr. Spread found one morning, on the small oval table at his bed-side an unopened vial, which Mrs. Lilly told him, in an emphatic and excited whisper, ought to have been shaken and taken the night before. Spread upbraided the patient mildly with this rash neglect of the doctor's prescriptions. "Do you remember," growled Barker, "what Molière said of his physicians?— Ils m'ordonne des remèdes; je ne les prends pas, et je guéris.'"

Barker, however, was not as successful as Molière in this humorous way of profiting by medical advice, for he became seriously ill in the course of the afternoon, and an express had to be sent for Dr. Chambers. This second crisis not only alarmed the bachelor, and made him less difficult to manage, but it also led him to summon his thoughts to council upon his temporal affairs, and hold a session of the court of conscience. Again and again his mind recurred to those repeated and earnest notices which he had seen in the public journals, not appealing to his interest (which a man is at liberty to slight, if he pleases), but rather implying that others were concerned as deeply as himself, assuming that he was in reality the Mr. Barker to whom the advertisements referred. He had hitherto

ascribed these notices to a quarter from which it was now certain that they had not proceeded. Some mysterious connection or relationship was possibly, therefore, still impending over him. His brother might have left a son or a daughter, who would, of course, by the laws of nature, have the best title to their uncle's property. He now began to reproach himself for not having made the proper inquiries while he was in a condition to do so. It would be monstrous to leave his property to strangers, while there were claims of kindred to be satisfied, or while there remained a probability, ever so slight, that claims of such a nature were in existence. Barker shrunk from the idea of doing posthumous injustice as instinctively as he did from the risk of incurring living responsibility. But what was to be done? He tortured himself thinking; resolved to dispatch Reynolds to Mr. Ramsay, of Chancery-lane; resolved not to do so; decided upon consulting Spread; reversed his decision, and determined to write upon the subject; changed that resolution again; adopted twenty others in its place; but ended by making up his mind finally to consult the oracle of friendship.

Then he racked himself also about things of less moment. What obligations was he not incurring to the proprietor of the cottage? He imagined what his own situation and feelings would be if a stranger, who had tumbled into the Serpentine, were brought to his chambers at the Albany, and were to use them as a hospital for several weeks, attended by doctors, apothecaries, and nurses, and visited there by all his friends and acquaintances. If the trouble he was giving, and the attentions he received, had been such as he could make a pecuniary return for, the case would have been different; but he was under the roof of a person whom he could only thank for her kind offices, and that person (to make matters worse) was a young and a pretty widow. Another man in his circumstances would have derived satisfaction from the feeling that the widow was young and pretty, instead of old and ugly; but Barker was unrivaled at extracting bitter out of sweets, and what would have gratified any body else only vexed and exasperated him. Mrs. Lilly was so conversable a woman, that she was in the habit of talking to herself when she had no one else to talk to; and as she mumbled the praises of Mrs. Grace from morning to night, and often so that the bachelor could hear well enough what she said, a suspicion at length flashed across his mind that Mrs. Grace (doubtless a crafty widow) had a sinister design in her attentions, and that Mrs. Lilly was a tool in her hands to victimize an ill-starred bachelor with twelve hundred a-year, and catch a lover or a legacy, accord

ing as he might or might not recover. A whimsical brain is never so whimsical as in sickness. This absurd crotchet took so fast a hold of Mr. Barker's fancy, that at last he began to persuade himself, not only that the doctors were engaged in the plot, but that there was something not purely accidental in the circumstance of the boat being overset close to the widow's cottage. In short, it would have been just as well for the bachelor's ease of mind to have informed him from the first that the cottage belonged to Mrs. Harry Farquhar.

As to poor little Mrs. Grace, she was the farthest person in all the world from harboring any sinister design against the heart of any man living. She was certainly all anxiety, even to devotedness, for the sick gentleman; but was there any thing more in this than ordinary good-nature, not to mention the directions she had received from Mrs. Farquhar to pay Mr. Barker every possible attention? It was certainly not for him that she looked so very piquant and wore her mourning weeds so smartly, for she never so much as came to his door to ask him how he passed the night, although now and then, when the door was ajar, he heard a musical whisper on the stairs, which he concluded was the voice of the wily widow, for it was very different from the mumbling of Mrs. Lilly.

When Spread visited him next, the bachelor alluded to the subject now uppermost in his thoughts, and gave the conversation such a turn that his friend was under the necessity of observing"You had a brother, Barker, I think.".

"Yes-he died at Bermudas."

"Did he leave a family?"

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I never heard that he did."

"Are you sure that he did not?"

"I can not exactly say that;" and Barker then, after some little hesitation, informed Mr. Spread of the advertisements which had been so often repeated in the leading journal of England.

"Ha!-how long since did the first advertisement appear?" cried Spread.

"About two months-two or three."

"Well, and what did you learn from Mr. Ramsay?"

"Nothing-I never applied to him."

"Never applied to him! That was wrong, Barker, very wrong," said Spread, his countenance suddenly assuming its gravest expression.

"You think so?"

"Of course I do. You may have been injuring others. Sup