heard your opinions on three most interesting topics women, and wine, and the duel; and, I assure you, not unprofitably."

"I'm not blown, not a bit run off my wind, for all that, if I wasn't so dry; but my mouth is like a limeburner's hat. Would you just touch that bell and order a little sherry or madeira? You don't seem to know the ways of the house here, but every one does exactly as he pleases."

"I have a faint inkling of the practice," said Maitland, with a very peculiar smile.

"What's the matter with you this evening? You're not like yourself one bit. No life, no animation about you. Ring again; pull it strong. There, they'll hear that, I hope," cried he, as, impatient at Maitland's indolence, he gave such a jerk to the bell-rope that it came away from the wire.

"I didn't exactly come in here for a gossip," said the Commodore, as he resumed his seat. "I wanted to have a little serious talk with you, and perhaps you are impatient that I haven't begun it, eh?”"

"It would be unpardonable to feel impatience in such company," said Maitland, with a bow.

"Yes, yes; I know all that. That's what Yankees call soft sawder; but I'm too old a bird, Master Maitland, to be caught with chaff, and I think as clever a fellow as you are might suspect as much." "You are very unjust to both of us, if you imply that I have not a high opinion of your acuteness."

"I don't want to be thought acute, sir: I am not a lawyer, nor a lawyer's clerk-I'm a sailor."

66 And a very distinguished sailor."

"That's as it may be. They passed me over about the goodservice pension, and kept 'backing and filling' about that coast-guard appointment till I lost temper, and told them to give it to the devil, for he never had been out of the Admiralty since I remembered it; and I said, 'Gazette him at once,

Pray draw closer," said Maitland, moving to one side; "make yourself perfectly at home here."

66

So I used to be, scores of times, in these very rooms. It's more than five-and-twenty years that I ever occupied any others."

"I was thinking of going back to the drawing-room for a cup of tea before I resumed my work here."

"Tea! don't destroy your stomach with tea. Get a little gin-they've wonderful gin here; I take a glass of it every night. Beck mixes it, and puts a sprig of, not mint, but marjoram, I think they call it. I'll make her mix a brew for you; and, by the way, that brings me to what I came about."

"Was it to recommend me to take gin?" asked Maitland, with a well-assumed innocence.

"No, sir-not to recommend you to take gin," said the old Commodore, sternly. "I told you when I came in that I had come on an errand of some importance."

"If you did, it has escaped me.' "Well, you shan't escape methat's all."

"I hope I misunderstand you. I trust sincerely that it is to the dryness of your throat and the state of your tonsils that I must attribute this speech. Will you do me the very great favour to recall it ?"

The old man fidgeted in his chair, buttoned his coat, and unbuttoned it, and then blurted out in an abrupt spasmodic way, "All right-I didn't mean offence-I intended to say, that as we were here now-that as we had this opportunity of explaining ourselves"

"That's quite sufficient, Commodore. I ask for nothing beyond your simple assurance that nothing offensive was intended."

"I'll be hanged if I ever suffered as much from thirst in all my life. I was eighteen days on a gill of water a-day in the tropics, and didn't feel it worse than this. I must drink some of that stuff, if I die for it. Which is the least nauseous?"

"I think you'll find the Vichy pleasant; there is a little fixed air in it, too."

"I wish there was a little cognac in it. Ugh! it's detestable! Let's try the other. Worse! I vow and declare-worse! Well, Maitland, whatever be your skill in other matters, I'll be shot if I'll back you for your taste in liquors."

Maitland smiled, and was silent. "I shall have a fever-I know I shall-if I don't take something. There's a singing in my head now like a chime of bells, and the back of my throat feels like a coal-bunker in one of those vile steamers. How you stand it I don't know; but to be sure you've not been talking as I have." The old Commodore rose,

but, when he reached the door, seemed suddenly to have remembered something; for he placed his hand to his forehead, and said, "What a brain I have! here was I walking away without ever so much as saying one word about it."

"Could we defer it till to-morrow, my dear Commodore?" said Maitland, coaxingly. "I have not the slightest notion what it is, but surely we could talk it over after breakfast."

"But you'll be off by that time. Beck said that there would be no use starting later than seven o'clock." "Off! and where to?"

"To the Burnside-to the widow Butler's-where else? You heard it all arranged at dinner, didn't you?"

"I heard something suggested laughingly and lightly, but nothing serious, far less settled positively."

"Will you please to tell me, sir, how much of your life is serious, and how much is to be accepted as levity? for I suppose the inquiry I have to make of you amounts just to that, and no more."

"Commodore Graham, it would distress me much if I were to misunderstand you once again to-night, and you will oblige me deeply if you will put any question you expect me to answer in its very simplest form."

"That I will, sir; that I will! Now then, what are your intentions ?"

"What are my intentions!" "Yes, sir-exactly so; what are your intentions?"

"I declare I have so many, on such varied subjects, and of such different hues, that it would be a sore infliction on your patience were I only to open the budget; and as to either of us exhausting it, it is totally out of the question. Take your chance of a subject, then, and I'll do my best to enlighten you."

"This is fencing, sir; and it doesn't suit me."

"If you knew how very little the whole conversation suits me, you'd not undervalue my patience."

"I ask you once again, what are your intentions as regards my youngest daughter, Miss Rebecca Graham? That's plain speaking, I believe." "Nothing plainer; and my reply shall be equally so. I have nonenone whatever."

"Do you mean to say you never paid her any particular attentions?" "Never."

"That you never took long walks with her when at Lyle Abbey, quite alone and unaccompanied ?"

"We walked together repeatedly. I am not so ungrateful as to forget her charming companionship." "Confound your gratitude, sir! it's not that I'm talking of. You made advances. You-you told her-you said-in fact, you made her believe-ay, and you made me believe that you meant to ask her to marry you.'

"Impossible!" said Maitland; "impossible!"

"And why impossible? Is it that our respective conditions are such as to make the matter impossible?"

en

"I never thought of such an impertinence, Commodore. When I said impossible, it was tirely with respect to the construction that could be placed on all my intercourse with Miss Graham."

"And I didn't go up to your room on the morning I left, and ask you to come over to Port Graham and talk the matter over with me?"

“You invited me to your house, but I had not the faintest notion that it was to this end. Don't shake your head as if you doubted me; I pledge you my word on it."

"How often have you done this sort of thing? for no fellow is as cool as you are that's not an old hand at it."

"I can forgive a good deal

Forgive! I should think you could forgive the people you've injured. The question is, Can I forgive? Yes, sir, can I forgive?"

"I declare it never occurred to me to inquire."

"That's enough-quite enough;

It may

you shall hear from me. take me twenty-four hours to find a friend; but before this time tomorrow evening, sir, I'll have him."

Maitland shrugged his shoulders carelessly, and said, "As you please, sir."

"It shall be as I please, sir; I'll take care of that. Are you able to say at present to whom my friend can address himself?"

"If your friend will first do me the favour to call upon me, I'll be able by that time to inform him.” "All right. If it's to be Mark Lyle

66

Certainly not; it could never occur to me to make choice of your friend and neighbour's son for such an office."

"Well, I thought not-I hoped not; and I suspected, besides, that the little fellow with the red whiskers-that major who dined one day at the Abbey

Maitland's pale cheek grew scarlet, his eyes flashed with passion, and all the consummate calm of his manner gave way as he said, "With the choice of my friend, sir, you have nothing to do, and I decline to confer further with you."

"Eh, eh! that shell broke in the magazine, did it? I thought it would. I'll be shot but I thought it would!” And with a hearty laugh, but bitter withal, the old Commodore seized his hat and departed.

Maitland was much tempted to hasten after the Commodore and demand-imperiously demandfrom him an explanation of his last words, whose taunt was even more in the manner than the matter. Was it a mere chance hit, or did the old sailor really know something about the relations between himself and M'Caskey? A second or two of thought reassured him, and he laughed at his own fears, and turned once more to the table to finish his letter to his friend.

"You have often, my dear Carlo, heard me boast, that amidst all the shifting chances and accidents of my life, I had ever escaped one

Or all the inventions of which necessity is the stern mother, the inventions of economy are the most prominent at the present day. Many new forces have recently been discovered and placed under the control of man, but it is the utilisation of hitherto useless things which still more peculiarly characterises our times. What our forefathers neglected or despised, we have learnt to appreciate; what they threw away, we carefully gather up. Nothing is too small or too mean to be disregarded by our scientific economy. The seeming rubbish and fag-ends of creation, which our ancestors would gladly have thrown over the garden-wall of the world into the limbo of chaos or of space, are now converted to profitable purposes, conducive to the greater comfort and prosperity of life. "Waste nothing" is the key-note of our material industry. In the farm and in the manufactory, and not least among the vast hives of population in our great cities, the word "refuse," in its old sense, is wellnigh exploded. We now see that everything is of use, if we take it to the right place, or put it to its right purpose. Just as the farmer turns even the weeds to account, as a manure for the fields which they encumbered, so is it in all the other branches of industry. The making of many small gains is now considered a safer and more profitable mode of business than aiming at a few large ones. It is the utilisation of neglected resources, the accumulation and concentrated appliance of a thousand forces or savings, each trifling of itself, which is the basis of our extending power. We are economising our Money, like everything else; and this economy of capital, almost as much as the new gold-mines, is the agency which is now giving to commerce its enormous expansion.

The first gold-seekers in Califor

nia, we are told, did their work so rudely and imperfectly that their successors, when they came into the field with new and better appliances, found it a profitable business to occupy the old diggings, and extracted from the despised heaps of refuse about as much of the precious metal as had been obtained by the first workers. The first comers thought only of nuggets and large prizes; the later ones sought their chief gain in concentrating and extracting the invisible grains of precious ore from over a wide and apparently unpromising field. The appliances of Banking have a similar effect in our social system. They have economised enormously the wealth of every country in which, like our own, they have been well developed. But even in England, until lately, banking was in a rudimentary state. The private banks of London, indeed, were perfect of their kind: their proprietary possesses the wealth which is requisite to insure confidence, and the practised ability (in most cases an hereditary experience) which insures efficient administration. The private banks throughout the country, on the other hand, could not be relied on as possessing either of these requisites, and were especially deficient as regards their amount of capital. The introduction of the joint-stock system-only recently adopted in England, though it has existed for more than a century and a half with marked success in Scotland an immense expansion to banking, and has proportionately increased the available capital of the nation.

has given

It is to Scotland that we must still look to see the economy of capital in the most perfect form that has yet been devised. There, every little country town has its bank or banks, branches of the