him. At length he came full upon the homestead. It was an old circular dwelling; so thronged about by tree and bush, that it seemed impossible that any light within could manifest itself to the distant wayfarer. A type this, as it will appear, of the heart of the master. He affected a solitude from the world: he believed that he was hidden from his fellow-man, and yet the inextinguishable goodness that glowed within him, made him a constant mark for the weary and wretched. For a brief space, St. Giles considered the cottage. It was plastered with rough-cast; at the first glance, seemingly a poor squalid nook. But a closer survey showed it to be a place where the household gods fared not upon black bread and mere water. The garden patch before it was filled with choicest flowers; not a weed intruded its idle life upon them. It was a place where neatness and comfort seemed to have met in happiest society. St. Giles listened, and heard low voices within. At length, he knocked at the door. "Who's there?" said the master of the house. "If it's for the taxes, come in the morning." "It's a traveller," answered St. Giles, "that wants help for a lot of poor souls that 's tumbled in a ditch. In a moment the door was opened, and a grey-headed, largefaced, burly man, with a candle in his hand, stood at the threshold. He warily placed the light between the speaker and himself, shading it, and with a suspicious glance looked hard upon St. Giles; whose eager soul was in a moment in his eyes; and then, trembling from head to foot, he cried, "God be blessed, sir-and is it indeed you? 66 My name, traveller, is Capstick," said the man, bending his brows upon St. Giles, and looking determined to be too much for the stranger at his door; a new-comer, it was very likely, come to trick him. My name is Capstick, what may be yours? Here, Jem, you slug do you know this pilgrim? Another moment, and Jem-old Bright Jem, with head, shrunk face, and low bent shoulders, stood in the door-way. Ere Jem could speak, St. Giles discovered him: here! Lord, who'd have hoped it ?" 66 66 grey grizzled And you, too, Don't know a feather on him," said Jem, "but he seems to know us, wet as he is." 66 Why, that's it, you see. know anybody who's a supper base part of our base nature." A fellow from a horse-pond will and bed to give him. It's the And then the misanthrope turned to St. Giles. 66 'Well, my wet friend, as you know my name and Jem's,-what mark may you carry in the world? What name you been ruddled with ? have St. Giles paused a moment; and then stammering said, “You shall know that by-and-bye.' 66 66 Very well," cried Capstick, we can wait." Saying this, he again stept back into the cottage, and was about to close the door. "Oh never mind me," cried St. Giles; "I'll get on as I can ; all I ask of you is to come and help the poor creturs; some of 'em dying with their hurts for what I know." "Jem," said Capstick, "we're fools to do it; but it's clear, we were born to be fools. So, get the lantern, that we may go and bury the dead. Do make haste, Jem," urged Capstick with strange misanthropy; albeit Jem moved about with all the vigour time had left him. "How you do crawl-though, after all, I don't see why you shouldn't. What's people in a ditch to them who've a warm bed and a snug roof over 'em? Then as for dying, death's every man's own business; quite a private affair, in which, as I see, nobody else has any right to trouble himself. Now, do come along, you old caterpillar," and Capstick, staff in hand, stept forth, Jem limping after him. Whilst Capstick leads the way,-a shorter one than that traversed by St, Giles-into the main road, we may explain to the reader the combined causes that have presented the muffin-maker and linkman as little other than eremites on the skirts of the borough of Liquorish. Mr. Capstick had turned his muffins into a sufficient number of guineas for the rest of his days, and therefore determined to retire from Seven Dials to the country. Mrs. Capstick would never hear of going to be buried alive from London; and therefore resolved upon nothing more remote than a suburban whereabout. Hackney, or Pimlico, or Islington, she might be brought to endure; but no, if she knew herself, nothing should make her go and live, as she pathetically put it, like an owl in a bush. Capstick met all these objections in his usually lofty way: "she was a foolish woman, but would learn better. This, again and again he avowed; though no man had less faith in the avowal than himself. Still, it kept up his dignity continually to call his wife a foolish woman; albeit, he was generally compelled to yield to the folly he imperiously condemned. Matters were at this crisis, when suddenly Mrs. Capstick fell sick and died. "She would have been an excellent creature," Capstick said, "if it had not been her misfortune to be a woman. However, poor soul! she could not help that; and therefore, why should he blame her?" Very often, Capstick would so deliver himself, his eyes filling with tears, as he tried to twitch his lips into a cynical smile at all woman-kind, and at the late Mrs. Capstick in particular. "Still," he would say, "she had her virtues. Every day of her life would she walk round every one of his shirt-buttons that no one of them might be missing. He hated all tomb-stone flourishes, otherwise he would have had that special virtue—he meant the buttons-specially named in her epitaph. One comfort, however, he always had to think of: whatever his love was for her, he never let her know it. Oh dear no! It was like showing the weak part of a fortress to all comers: some day or the other 'twould be sure to be taken advantage of.” And the death of Mrs. Capstick-the muffin-maker would never confess that for months he pined like a solitary dove at the loss— left him free to choose his abode. Whereupon he quitted London, and built himself a house almost buried in a wood some two miles from Liquorish; and this house, or hut, he, setting himself up as a sort of Diogenes-kind, butter-hearted impostor!-called with a flourish, The Tub! The satire was lost upon nearly all the inhabitants of Liquorish, many of whom discovered, as they believed, a very natural cause for so strange a name. There was no doubt it was urged by many-that Capstick had, in his day, made large sums of money by smuggling: hence, out of pure gratitude to the source of his fortune, he had called his cottage a Tub. Indeed, two or three of the shrewder sort dropt mystic hints about the possibility of finding, somehow attached to the Tub, an unlawful still. People-this apothegm clenched the suspicion in the hearts of some people did not live in a wood for nothing! Bright Jem had lost his cordial, good-natured mate some four or five years before the death of Mrs. Capstick. He would, in his despair, tell the muffin-maker that "his poor Susan had somehow carried away his heart into her grave with her; he had no mind to do nothing." Sometimes too, he would borrow a melancholy similitude from the skittle-ground, and shaking his head, would exclaim that "he was a down pin." To this sorrow, the muffinmaker would apply what he thought a sharp philosophy by way of cure. He would mean to drop gall and vinegar into the hurts of |