when the door opened, and in walked our two friends of the preceding evening, Lord George Darford and Mr. Penryn, who usually hunted time in couples, and meant to kill half an hour with Lady Matilda. Great, indeed, was their astonishment at the party they found assembled, and the exhibition they interrupted. Our young actor might have added—

"Our shepherds fled for safety and for succour,”

for sudden was the flight this produced in the family; -Mrs. Hobson displaying to the still wondering eyes of the intruders, as she moved towards the door, the broad back of her splendid pelisse, whose unequally-worn texture showed at once, that her velvet was English, and her habits sedentary. The young ladies followed in a cluster, stooping, shuffling, poking, and using every other means by which English young ladies of a certain class get out of the Roscius, alone, "still hovered about the enemy"-till, with some difficulty, he had extricated his shapeless hat from under the feet of Lord George, who was, by this time, sprawling on the sofa; and having achieved this, with a formal bow, which he had learnt at the same time as his speech, he left the

room.

"What, in the name of wonder," said Lord George, "is that young Esquimaux, whom we found exhibiting; and who are his attendant squaws?"

"That Lady was the sister of Sir James; the

others were her children;" Lady Matilda replied, in a tone calculated to stop any further attempts at ridicule.

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"Quite manqué, our party at Eatington's," said Mr. Penryn, thinking it right to turn the conversation. "A Quaker's meeting would have been more lively," added Lord George. "I did not find it pleasant, certainly," Lady Matilda sincerely replied. Only think," said Mr. Penryn, "of their asking, together, two rival purveyors of wit; who, besides the natural jalousie de metier, had had a downright quarrel. Of course, as always happens, they got next each other; and were so occupied in showing that they did not mind it, that they could think of nothing else. But there is nothing so proverbially unlucky as the lottery of a dinner-table. One is sure to get next the person one most wishes to avoid; don't you think so, Lady Matilda?"

This appeal was made at random, and without any consciousness of how conclusive a testimony she could bear to the justness of his proposition. But Lord George saved her the awkwardness of assent, by taking the allusion to himself. "I trust, Lady Matilda will not assent to a doctrine against which I must vehemently protest," said he, with a slight bow. "Oh! you George!-Aye, I had forgotten," said his friend; "but I don't think your other neighbour, Lady Matilda, seemed properly aware of the

F

peculiar advantages of his situation; I never was so disappointed in a man in my life as in Lord Ormsby."

"We used to reckon him a very pleasant fellow, before he went abroad," said Lord George; "I recollect, when I first came out, no party was quite the thing, without Augustus Arlingford."

The reader will probably observe, that there is a little anachronism in this statement of Lord George's; and that his recollection of their previous acquaintance had not occurred to him at the meeting of the evening before.

"But," Mr. Penryn continued, "with all his fun, he had always an infernal sentimental turn. Just before he went abroad, we all thought that he had got some little rural attachment-some Clari, in the country."

"Perhaps then, after all," said Lord George, "the constant swain is going to marry her; for as I was coming to you, I saw him get into his travelling-carriage, at Mivart's."

This intelligence, which was communicated towards the conclusion of their visit, was highly satisfactory to Lady Matilda; not only because it relieved her from the immediate embarrassment of the intended dinner, which her acquaintance with the Hobson family had not rendered less formidable, but also on general grounds; for, however she might

exert herself in public, the experience of her feelings of the preceding evening, convinced her, that the less she saw of Lord Ormsby the better.

CHAPTER V.

THANKS to Mac Adam and a rapid succession of "first and second turn out," our hero found himself, towards the evening of the morrow, at the lodge gate leading to Ormsby Castle.

Home is said to possess an universal attraction, felt by the traveller in all his wanderings-"Who drags at each remove a lengthening chain ;”—and the return to the scenes of our youth, at whatever age, and under whatever circumstances, is supposed to impart a till then unknown pleasure. But, like the seeds of all human passions, however equally innate in the breast of all, its development is dependent on the habits of the person, and its growth proportioned to the strength of the charm by which it exerts its influence.

The fanciful Gall may find the thieving boss, or bump, alike prominent on the cranium of the vagabond and the right honourable. On one, its impulse irresistibly leads to felony and the gallows; on the

other, at most, it can only tend to suspicion at the gaming-table, or stifled disgrace as a public defaulter.

And so it is with respect to the universality of this attraction towards home. The returned seafaring apprentice, who pokes his way back to his indigenous garret in Wapping, can form but a faint idea of the proud sensations of Lord Ormsby, as he again entered the magnificent domains of his native place. On every side thousands of rival monarchs of the wood, with all the accumulated dignity of centuries, and all the freshness and gaiety of a young summer foliage, waved their outstretched arms at the arrival of their lord and master.

Varied glades of verdant lawn conducted the eye where, from the summit of remote and apparently inaccessibly crags, the wilder scions of the forest nodded their distant homage. The mountain stream roared its rude welcome from afar, which, at its nearer approach, was softened into the silent tribute of an extensive lake. The setting sun lent his oblique rays to glitter through every branch, and sparkle on the surface of the waters, greeting our hero with a natural illumination, compared with which the greatest artificial efforts of the kind, that ever victory bought, or faction extorted, were dreary and pitiful. It was thus that Lord Ormsby arrived at the mansion of his fathers, for the first time as its master.