not being usually in a sufficiently flourishing condition to allow of the luxury of a clean almanack every twelve months; and even the one which already served to enlighten his office had been purchased at half price when two months old.

"Do take a seat, Mr. Longstaff!" exclaimed the legal adviser of the village, as he raised his head, and, in apparent astonishment, beheld that gentleman still upon his feet, though without reflecting, it would seem, that his request could be much more easily made than complied with, there being not a single accommodation for the weary in his whole office, with the exception of the two high stools occupied respectively by himself and his clerk, and the low one of which Mrs. Clink had already taken possession. Longstaff, however, was soon enabled very kindly to compromise the matter; for while hunting about with his eyes in quest of a supporter of the description mentioned, he beheld in the far corner by the fireplace a few breadths of deal-plank fixed on tressels, by way of table, and partially covered with sundry sheets of calf-skin, interspersed with stumps of long-used pens, and crowned with a most business-like, formidable-looking pounce-box. To this quarter he accordingly repaired, and having placed one thigh across the corner of the make-shift table, while he stood plump upright on the other leg, began very seriously to stare into the fire.

Some minutes of profound silence ensued.

The ghostly clerk stopped short in his half-idle labour, as though hesitating what to do, and then made this learned inquiry of his employer, "Pray, sir, should this parchment be cut?"

"Certainly it should," replied the latter testily. "Don't you see it's an indenture?—and an indenture is not an indenture, and of no force, until it is cut."

The novice accordingly, at a very accelerated speed, proceeded to cut it. Shortly afterwards he again had to trouble his master.

"Should I say 'before said' or 'above said?'"

"Above, certainly," replied the sage. "'Before said' means the first thing that ever was written in the world,—before anything else that has ever been written since. Write 'above,' to be sure."

The clerk wrote "above" accordingly, while Longstaff and the lady looked up in admiration of Mr. Skinwells acuteness, and Skin well himself looked boldly into the steward's face, with all the brass of a knowing one triumphant in his knowledge.

It will be remembered by the reader, that on the occasion of the birth of our hero Colin, Dr. Rowel expressed to those about him some curiosity respecting the little fellow's father.

Happily, then, for the doctor's satisfaction, he chanced to enter Skinwell's office upon private business just as the above brief conversation had terminated, and before that examination of Mrs. Clink had commenced, in which a father was legally to be given him. The doctor, then, was upon the point of being gratified from the very best authority.

Having now concluded the writing with which he had been engaged, the joint lawyer and overseer of the parish called to the woman Clink, and bade her stand up and look at him; and, in order to afford her every facility for doing so to the best advantage, he planted both his elbows firmly upon the desk, rested his chin upon both his hands, which stood up against his cheeks in such a manner as to convey to a casual spectator the idea that he was particularly solicitous about a pair of red scanty whiskers, like moles, which grew beneath, and then fixed his eyes in that particular place above the wooden horizon that inclosed him, in which the disc of Mrs. Clink's head now began slowly to appear. As she came gradually and modestly up, she met first the gaze of the lawyer, then of his clerk, then of Dr. Rowel, and then of Mr. Longstaff; so that by the time she was fully risen, four men's faces confronted her at once, and with such familiar earnestness, that, though not apt to be particularly tender-hearted in others' cases, she burst into tears at her own.

"Ay, ay, doctor," sneeringly remarked Skinwell to that worthy professional, "this is just it. They can always cry when it is too late, instead of crying out at the proper time." Then looking fiercely in the downcast countenance of the yet feeble culprit before him, he thus continued his discourse. "Come, come, woman, we can't have any blubbering here—it won't do. Hold your head up; for you can't be ashamed of seeing a man, I should think." The surgeon, the steward, the clerk, and the brutal wit himself smiled.

"Come, up with it, and let us look at you."

Colin's mother sobbed louder, and, instead of complying with this gratuitously insolent request, buried her face so much lower in the folds of the shawl that covered her neck, and hung down upon her bosom, as to present to the gaze of the inquiring overseer almost a full-moon view of the crown of her bonnet.

"Hum!" growled Skinwell; "like all the rest—not a look to be got at them. Well, now, listen to me, my good woman. You know what you 're brought here for?"

A long-drawn snuffle from the other side of the partition, which sounded very much like what musicians term a shake, seemed to confess too deeply the painful fact.

Mr. Longstaff's merriment was here evinced by a single explosion of the breath, which would have done much better to blow a lamp out with than to convince any body that he was pleased. The surgeon did not change countenance, while the clerk made three or four discursive flourishes with his pen on the blotting-paper before him, as much as to say he would take the propriety of laughing into further consideration. Mr. Skinwell then continued.

"Now, now, woman,—do attend to me. It is impossible that my valuable time can be wasted in this manner. Who is that child's father?"

"Yes, yes," echoed Mr. Longstaff, tapping the poor woman in joyful expectation upon the shoulder; "just say the word, and have done with it."

Every eye was fixed on Mrs. Clink. After a brief pause, during which the tears yet remaining in her eyes were hastily dried up with the corner of her shawl, she raised her head with a feeling of confidence scarcely to be expected, and directing her eyes through the little palisadoes which stopped the wooden partition full at Mr. Skinwell, she said, in a voice sufficiently loud to be heard by all present,—

"If you please, sir, it is Mr. Longstaff, the steward."

The office was amazed; while Mr. Longstaff himself started up in an attitude of mute astonishment, which Chantrey himself could scarcely have represented.

"Longstaff, the steward!" ejaculated Skin-well.

"Impossible!" observed Dr. Rowel.

"It's false!" muttered the clerk.

"It is false!" repeated the accused man in a faint voice. "Why, gentlemen,—a man with a wife and family,—in my situation;—it's monstrous and diabolical. If I could pull your tongue across your teeth," he continued, turning to Colin's mother, and shaking his fist in her face, "I'd cure it and hang it up, as an eternal example to such arrant liars. You know I'm as innocent as a March lamb,—you do, you deceitful woman!"

Original Size

Mrs. Clink, however, persisted in her statement, and avowed her readiness to take her oath upon the fact; so that Mr. Longstaff was obliged to submit with the best or the worst grace he might.

This small scrap of experience fully convinced him, however, that Squire Lupton's views upon the subject of the forty-third of Elizabeth, which he had formerly opposed, were not only perfectly correct in themselves, but that they ought to have been extended much further, and that the exemption of which the squire had spoken, ought to have embraced not only county