It was true. Death had determined the curative labours of Mr. Gurwood of The Laurels. The patient-Ann Reeve, according to the casebook-was no more; had been dead, apparently, some hours; had drifted into death, silently, peacefully, painlessly, while the nurse worked at the window. Only one more note to be added to Mr. Gurwood's report "Dead; such a date."

now.

"Not a hopeful case from the first," said Mr. Gurwood. "I expressly guarded myself from ever saying that it was. But every thing possible. was done for the patient. Be sure of that. It's a consolation to remember that now."

"And this was the work of Richard Gifford," William Moyle hissed into the ear of Noel Tredgold; and then waited, as though to let the words sink deep and take root in the young man's heart. Noel did not answer; made no sign; it was as though he had not heard.

They were hurrying back to town again; the cabman lashing his steaming horse, eager to get from among the green fields and trees, back again to the streets and houses of town; lashing him perhaps unnecessarily; driving indeed rather unsteadily.

"Noel," William Moyle went on, "I saw your father, Bryan Tredgold, the first thing when he came back from Australia, from transportation. Would you like to hear what he said to me? I remember the words well. They frightened me, they were so fiercely spoken. For Bryan meant what he said. 'Moyle,' he said, 'if ever I prayed at all, I prayed I might come home to have my fingers, for five minutes, at Richard Gifford's throat! Five minutes!' he cried, and he beat upon the table with his fist; I can see him do it now; I seem to hear his voice; 'half a minute would be enough.' His eyes shone so brightly, you'd have thought they were flashing fire. The two men never met; it would have gone hard with Richard Gifford if they had. Poor Bryan died before he could make his words good; before he could be even with that villain. And listen; a word in your ear. Bryan never knew what we know; he had no notion of Gurwood's patient; he thought her deadyour mother, Noel-dead of decline; letters were written to tell him so years and years ago. If he had seen what we have seen to-day,-all Richard Gifford's doing, mind you, Noel, don't forget that,-if he had seen what we have, I wouldn't have given much for Richard Gifford's chance of life. Bryan wouldn't have taken his hand from his throat till the man was dead, quite dead. And he'd have served him rightserved him right. Bryan was a brave, strong man; he'd have killed that man as he would a wild-beast; and he'd have done well! Oh, if he'd but have known of Gurwood's patient, not all the world would have held him back from Richard Gifford's throat!"

Still Noel made no answer. The cab whirled on, stopping only now and then at public-houses for drink for William Moyle and the driver, who both had had quite enough-more than enough. In their speed they failed to notice an old man journeying from town, who looked at

them curiously, stopping to turn round and look, long after they had passed.

"What mad game is William playing?" asked John Moyle; for it was he. There was an expression of alarm upon his face as he cried: "Good Heavens! can it be? the scoundrel has been taking Noel to The Laurels!"

He was proceeding there himself, bent on one of those pilgrimages he was in the habit of making at stated times, journeying on foot, as though to a shrine, by way of penance, self-imposed for some wrong-doing in the past.

At The Laurels he was duly informed of all that had happened.

"Poor soul!" he said, as he stood by the body of Dr. Gurwood's patient; "her trials are over for ever." Presently he added, "If she could but have seen and known her boy!"—the tears coursed down his cheeks," her poor boy Noel!"

Returning to town very late, he muffled up the medallion portrait in a cloud of crape.

Then he inquired for Noel. But Noel had not returned to Quebec Street; had not been seen since quite early in the morning.

Country Newspapers.

THE fast four-horse coach, whose box-seat was so pleasant on a fine summer day, has disappeared from our roads. The grimy engine-driver has succeeded to the many-caped and thirsty coachman; the shrieking steam-whistle has silenced the guard's horn. To another generation the tales of adventure which are associated with the "old coaching times" will seem strangely unreal. Mr. Dickens's inimitably graphic pages have immortalised the humour and picturesqueness of stage-coach travel; but it is easy to conceive that future readers, born to rapid and luxurious railway transit, may fail to fully apprehend the truth of the great novelist's descriptions. Mr. Dickens has also immortalised a couple of rival country editors; but the time will come when his amusing sketch, which is not a caricature, although it reads like one, will seem to most readers incredible. For railways, which have destroyed the royal mail, are rapidly destroying the country paper also. Both were famous institutions once; there was equal dignity about them; the people of the county-town were proud alike of the well-appointed coach, which started for London from their principal inn, and of the oracular broadsheet which uttered its infallibilities every market-day. But alas for the old-established journal! The railway now brings down the Times and its contemporaries every day by breakfast-time; and, worst of all, there are those terrible penny papers, which every body purchases as a matter of course, and against which it is vain to struggle. So the editor's occupation is rapidly going. If the town be a large one, and at sufficient distance from London, the old-fashioned journal astonishes its supporters by a transformation surpassing any thing in a pantomime, and appears as a penny daily. Hard, even then, is the struggle against the fuller information of the London penny papers; and if partial success be attained, the result is something quite different from the country newspaper of the past.

The daily papers of a town like Manchester are of course entirely exceptional. Manchester is the metropolis of that busy region whose business has of late been so unhappily paralysed; and its journals reach towns farther north, which are inaccessible from London until a late hour of the day. There is logical reason for the existence of daily papers in towns of this class. Take, however, the case of a town with about eighty or a hundred thousand inhabitants, and without any central influence or importance. Such a place generally possessed two leading weekly papers, one Conservative and the other Liberal, with perhaps three or four others of minor importance. Suddenly a daily paper is started, either by the proprietors of one of the weeklies, or by an adventurer from a distance. A second will certainly appear within a few weeks. Every body buys one or the other of them; the circulation and

advertisements of the older papers dwindle away; but it by no means follows that the new experiments are successful. The expenses of daily journals are very large, and country advertisers do not care to pay high prices; so that there may be very little profit about a penny paper, which every one appears to buy. And, then, when the first excitement is over, the sale begins to drop: men become disgusted with the necessary meagreness of the general news, and the necessary frivolity and triviality of the local intelligence; and a person who can get the Times for threepence at eleven o'clock, or perhaps earlier, thinks even a penny wasted on the flimsy and illiterate production of his own town. The telegraphic news is generally the only important part of the paper; and in all large towns there are public rooms, where the telegrams are fixed up as they arrive. Those who deem the epithet "illiterate" too harsh, should try to read the leading articles of half a dozen country papers: they are generally admirable for the perfection of their bad English and false logic. There are striking exceptions, certainly; but the average quality is dreadful.

Starting a newspaper appears to have for some minds a singular fascination. Just as there are men who must back race-horses, or play chicken-hazard, so there are others to whom newspaper enterprise is a necessity of life. The oftener they fail, the better they seem to like it. Doubtless there is plenty of absurd speculation in every other class of commercial enterprise; but the places in which newspapers are started, and the style of journal produced, are positively amazing. There is a fishing-village in some pleasant nook of the coast: an adventurous traveller, hating London-super-Mare and its minor rivals, spends a pleasant month there, bathing and boating; he is unwise enough to mention his discovery to his acquaintances, who come down in force; and the little village sets up for a watering-place. There will be a weekly newspaper, with a correct list of distinguished visitors, in a year or two; the local poetaster will edit it, putting copious verses of his own in one corner. The local poetaster usually begins life as assistant to a tailor, shoemaker, or schoolmaster; and it is almost as certain that he will culminate as editor of a small newspaper, as that a grub will become a butterfly. Absurd as the fishing-village journal may seem, the daily paper in a third or fourth class town is even more ridiculous, as involving harder work and greater loss. And the way in which such a speculation originates is curious, and might perhaps be treated on scientific principles by Mr. Darwin. A year or two ago a speculator, coming I know not whence, started a daily paper in a town of the north, with perhaps 90,000 inhabitants. Let him be called A. B, the proprietor of the chief weekly paper in the place, pooh-poohed the rival enterprise; but, much to his disgust, he soon discovered that it was injuring his journal. Wise enough to learn by experience, he looked about for a new field; and, travelling some hundreds of miles south-westward, he started a penny paper in an ancient city, which is proverbially slow to move. C, chief

newspaper proprietor in this city, was appalled; the course he took was to start a rival daily paper. D, a literary young gentleman with some capital in a town another hundred miles farther from Town, was edified by what he saw occurring, and started a daily paper in the place of his residence. E, proprietor of a Liberal paper in that place, found himself compelled to do likewise, and made a curious blunder in the commencement; for he published his penny paper only five times a week, expecting people to buy his exolete weekly, at three or four pence, on the other day. Between the city in which B and C held rivalry, and the town where D and E were at feud, and about equidistant from each, stood an old cathedral city, where E's brother (call him F) published a most trenchant Radical paper. It hath been written, that

"Autumnal sunshine seems to fall

With riper beauty, mellower, brighter,

On every favoured garden-wall

Whose owner wears the mystic mitre."

And again, concerning a certain fortunate and indolent dean :

"Calm, silent, sunny; whispereth

No tone about that sleepy Deanery,

Save when the mighty organ's breath

Came hushed through endless aisles of greenery.

No eastern breezes swung in air

The great elm-boughs, or crisped the ivy;

The powers of nature seemed aware

Dean Willmott's motto was Dormivi."

But if the wearer of the "mystic mitre" be the sharpest pamphleteer of the day, and if there be a truculent editor lying in wait for him at every turn, it is probable that the lotos-eating calm suggested in these verses will scarcely fall to the lot of the dean and the minor ecclesiastic dignitaries. Certes, the city in which F's newspaper made so great a fuss is among the most tranquil in England to a man who does not trouble himself about episcopal pamphlets or country journals. However, when F saw himself between the fires of B and C north-eastward, of D and E south-westward, all whose papers reached his neighbourhood before he had his matutine bath, he thought he would start a daily paper too. He did so; it lasted either three or four days; and then, finding that the inhabitants of a cathedral town were too somnolent a race to appreciate diurnal information and instruction, he incontinently gave it up. It was the great blunder of his life. Hereupon D, the young literary gentleman already mentioned, started a daily paper in the cathedral city, which was almost an exact duplicate of the one which he already published in a certain town to the south-west. This of course failed in a month or two. Professor Huxley has stated somewhere, that the existence of humble-bees is intimately connected with the existence of cats. Field-mice eat humble-bees; cats eat fieldmice: so, where cats are abundant, humble-bees will be abundant also.