foreign to my real character, that my disposition and temper have suffered materially. In one point of view I can hardly regret the untoward circumstance, since it gave me an opportunity of an insight into the frankness and generosity of your nature.-E. B.

CHAPTER V.

MR. PENNYWISE CLOSE, THE GOOD YOUNG MAN HIS VICTIM.

WILI. it be a glorious state of things when the onward advance of civilization and progress shall have halted and bivouacked at that station where the enemies, vice and folly, have been completely routed and put hors de combat. When there shall be no need of warnings and examples for the rising generation, because everybody will be himself an example to himself and everybody else. When there shall be no occasion to lecture or punish a world so wise, so gentle, and so good, that every individual will be minding his own business and proceeding incontinently to the discharge of his own duty; when people will know nothing but what they ought to know, and do nothing but

what they ought to do; when the rich will be emulous of changing places with the poor, and the poor so contented and happy, such true philosophers, that they will not hear of it on any account; or when there will be no distinctions of rich and poor, but an universal equality of worldly as well as intellectual wealth, and beauty and knowledge; everyone will have the same number of acres, and exactly the same balance at his banker's, when the very memory of such words as bribery and corruption, scandal, avarice, pride, pestilence, famine, war, &c., shall be utterly forgotten, and the vices of play, betting and horse-racing, drinking, smoking, &c, will be as interesting monuments of a barbarian age as the relics of the ancient Britons.

ye

ages,

Hail unborn when the memory of a fast young man shall be handed down by tradition and we shall have infinitely more doubts of the existence of a " downy cove" than of the megatherium or the mastodon; when a latch key dug up from the ruins of ancient

London shall excite the speculation of the curious and the learned among posterity as the Ninevah remains are now doing. When among other changes which have taken place, the term governor shall no longer be applied to our masculine parent, and the popular enquiry "how's your mother; does she know you're out," otherwise rendered" is your maternal relative aware of your absence from the domiciliary residence," shall have sunk into wellmerited oblivion. When club-houses shall have disappeared and cab-drivers shall really make use of that respectable phraseology which by a fiction of the guide books they are believed by foreigners to use.

Nothing would seem a more glorious object for the ambition of the rising generation to aim at than the title of a steady or a good young man, and we believe the terms to be synonimous. Mr. Pennywise Close, already mentioned in these is never defined in pages, other any He is never spoken of as a rich, or a poor, or a talented, or a fast, (oh no, not he indeed) or

way.

as anything else but a good young man, u steady young man. But this, like the aphorism, that people are no better than they should be, has a signification different from the simple meaning it apparently implies. We have often observed that when people have no peculiarity of character whatever, no bias, nor inclination in any direction in particular, no fondness or taste, or addiction, either to good or evil, or to any mortal thing more than another, when in short, they so nearly resemble automata that it may seem a libel on them to consider their existence as anything but one continued daily mistake, then we speak of them in a very summary manner as good. It may be a prejudice, but we incline to think that it requires some positive abilities, and not the mere absence of qualities to be good. Something like a heart, a mind, a soul; some active recognition of the principles of right and wrong, while practically we find the shortest way of arriving at the distinction of a good young man is to say nothing, feel nothing, and in short to approach as near as