to his master's inquiries, that he was as quiet as a lamb and as easy as an arm-chair. A crossbreed between a lamb and an arm-chair, seemed to Goldingham precisely the sort of animal upon which he should like to commence his equestrian experiments; and finding horsemanship a much easier acquisition and pleasanter exercise than he had anticipated, he frequently indulged in it, to the benefit of his health as well as the exhilaration of his spirits. Still, however, feel ing the want of a companion in these excursions, as well as in the long evenings at home, it occurred to him that he might at all events secure the society of his nephew, Reuben Apsley, whom he had not long before dispatched to Oxford to complete the last term of his education. Eager to grasp at any thing that promised to relieve him from his ennui, and having been always warmly attached to Reuben, whom he had now resolved to adopt as his son and successor at Goldingham Place, upon condition of his taking the name, he immediately wrote to summon him home; giving such minute directions as to the stage by which he should travel, and the route

from the high road to the Lodge, that it required a very clear head not to be perplexed and puzzled by his explanations. So satisfied was he with this arrangement, and the precision with which he had given his orders, that when he had sealed his letter, he testified his complacency by his customary "hem!" and almost emptied his waistcoat pocket of its lumps of sugar as he walked up and down settling future plans for the joint occupation and recreation of himself and Reuben.

It has already been slightly intimated, that his nephew's parents, together with his sister, were presumed to have perished at sea; the vessel in which they embarked on their return to Europe from the East Indies never having been heard of, although many years had elapsed from the time of their sailing. Circumstances had induced the father to take his wife and daughter with him, when his commercial affairs rendered it necessary that he should visit the East; and to leave Reuben, who was considerably younger than his sister, under the care of his uncle Goldingham. As several vessels were

known to have perished in a dreadful hurricane that swept the whole Indian ocean not long after they sailed on their homeward voyage, it was taken for granted that their ship had foundered in the same tornado, and that not a soul on board had been saved; in which conviction Goldingham collected the remains of his brother-in-law's fortune for the benefit of his sole surviving child, whom he thenceforward determined to treat as his own

son.

Reuben was a boy at the time of this presumed catastrophe, but not too young to know and feel, even had his heart been less acutely sensitive that it was, the full extent of his loss. At no other period of his life, perhaps, would the same calamity have made an impression so deep, desolating, and ineradicable, for at no other time could it have produced so total a change in his mode of existence. He was an only son, beloved by both his parents with a devotedness so intense and passionate, that, like the clinging ivy, they might have withered the young plant around which their heart-strings

were entwined, had not its native vigour ena bled it to bear up under their over-fond em braces without being warped or weakened. (As he could derive little assistance from his yet undeveloped reason, it might be said that he exhibited a constitutional rectitude in all his propensities, as if he were naturally too amia. ble to be spoilt, even by an injudicious indul gence. His intellectual capacity, however, was not less strong than his affections, and indeed it will be generally found that the higher and more noble qualities of the head and heart accompany one another. From such a youth, so gifted by nature, so endeared by his amiable character, so precious from his being an only son, his parents could not bear to part; and his father, well qualified for the task by his having been always addicted to literature, took the entire charge of his education.

Such was the delightful home, such the scene of tenderness from which Reuben was suddenly wrenched away, when his father's commercial engagements compelled him to make the voyage to India, in which it was

deemed advisable that his wife and daughter should accompany him, Reuben was sent to school, at all times a trying disruption to boys of the toughest temperament, and doubly dis tressing to one so susceptible as himself, who had been hitherto fondled and cradled, as it were, in the very heart of his parents, and was thrown into a large seminary at a period when such institutions were governed with a severity still more savage and wanton than that by which too many of them are degraded even at the present æra. His talents and good conduct saved him from the ferocity of his task-masters, but he was perpetually revolted in all his tastes, habits, and affections; his heart, like an unsupported vine, withered for want of something which it might embrace, and he was only saved from despair by the single, sweet, and almost redeeming consolation of the schoolboy, a certainty that every miserable day brings him nearer to the holidays. At that period he hoped at least to be able to converse about his parents, perhaps to receive tidings of them from others, or letters from