afraid it is getting so very late that we shall be forced to defer the pleasure till another time."

"Oh, it won't take you five minutes,-barely two, if you don't interrupt me," rejoined Jerry, pushing him down again into the chair he had just vacated; "it's really a capital story, and has a deep moral in it as well, and as I'm in a story-telling mood tonight, I'll give you it."

Joseph Linton shrugged his shoulders, and glanced despairingly up to the ceiling; but there was no help for it, and so he resigned himself without a murmur to his fate, whilst Mr. Shilletoe, sipping his toddy at every pause in his narrative, detailed in a very energetic manner

HOW JACK DALRYMPLE MADE LOVE, AND GOT MARRIED,

AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

JACK DALRYMPLE, for he was even christened by that rather ungenteel soubriquet, was at the time at which we take up his history, a rather wild,-fact's the term, now, they tell me,-goodnatured, conceited, devil-may-care, vagabond of two and thirty, or thereabouts, with a plentiful stock of impudence, a jaunty figure, a merry, good-looking phiz, an income of three hundred and twenty pounds sterling per annum, which, with a full-blood mare, and gig, an ugly brute of a terrier, and a spicy set of chambers somewhere near the Adelphi, formed his sole worldly goods and chattels whatever.

How Jack, with all these advantages came to weather the shady side of thirty without being spliced, is a mystery as inexplicable as the sphinxes, the potatoe rot, or the morality of a ballet girl. He'd had lots of offers, for every pretty lass, were she maid or widow, courted Jack with an ardour that was perfectly delightful to behold. But Jack was far too old a bird to be caught with such clumsy tricks, and so he still flirted, and dangled, and made love as merrily as ever, trusting to his own luck, and between ourselves he had the old gentleman's share of that, or my name isn't Jerry Shilletoe, to carry him unscathed through more deadly sieges than ever Troy stood of old.

Mr. Shilletoe here took a long sip, and Joseph Linton yawned; thus admonished, Jerry went on.

Now, Jack had been living very fast all through one jolly season. What with the Opera, the Haymarket, Ascot, and the Cider Cellars, night after night, and what with swanhopping up the river, and pic-nicking down to Norwood and Hampton, he began to feel rather used up, someway about the beginning of August, and fancy all wasn't right with his liver and digestive organs.

Well, gentlemen, my friend wasn't the chap to strike his colours without a blow, so he goes off to his doctor,-a crusty old file that would have cozened you back to life had you been in the very ribs of death,-and says he,

"Doctor, I feel very seedy, and out of sorts: quite done up. Touched in the wind; had a twinge of gout yesterday, after dinner; told yesterday I'd had the jaundice, I was so confoundedly yellow." "Ah, yes, I see," said his father confessor, handling his pulse, and looking half a yard or more down his throat; "been living a leetle irregularly, lately, I suppose."

Of course Jack swore he'd been living like an anchorite, but old Pilgarlick was too old a bird to be caught with such chaff, and so he put poor Jack on a starving regimen, with alternate skirmishings of black draught and Gregory's powders, every two hours, and would'nt let the poor wretch taste any thing stronger than water-gruel, for his life. Well, of course, at the end of a week, Jack was a jolly subject for a dissecting table, and as old Pilgarlick was a perfect ghoule, for that kind of thing, and Jack being a single man, and therefore very likely to be turned over to the old wretch, should he slip stays, why, of course, he began to feel rather uncomfortable, and began to rack his brains to find some means of cheating the doctor.

"Very like a whale," muttered Jack, one day, limping to the glass, and scanning a lantern-jawed, hollow-eyed, spectral visage laid out in pretty little alternations of green and lilac, like a bunch of withered tulips; and so Jack crawled back to bed again, and lay for an hour or more, like a hen sitting on an addled egg, maturing a plan which had just flas. ed across his brain.

At night, after the doctor's visit, Jack bribed his landlady to give him a tumbler of good stiff brandy flip, instead of the vile decoction of water-gruel and elder-syrup he had heretofore been regaled with; and whether it was the brandy, or the good night's rest, or the resolution he had come to to cheat the doctor, or all three, it's hard to say, but in the morning he got up quite strong and hearty, and eat his breakfast like a hero; of course he was not a bit fatter than he was the day before, and his poor bony phiz looked wonderfully ghostly, but Jack thought little of that, but got on his great coat-and it was a capital slack fit then,— and put a muffler round his neck, and then sent Mrs. Brown off for a hackney-coach. Jack did not let out even to her where he was going, and so the old woman fell into the natural delusion that he was going to see old Pilgarlick, or he would not have been let off so easy.

Well, when the coach came, Jack got in it, and ordering the coachman to drive through bye streets, he got safely at last to the London Bridge Station, and getting his carpet-bag, which he had somehow or other smuggled away with him from under old Mrs.

Brown's very nose, safely stowed away, took a first-class ticket, intending to spend a week or two at Brighton; the fear of meeting somebody he knew there, however, made him alter his course, and taking a cross over the country, he found himself arrived, by easy stages, at Scarborough. Jack summered it here for a week or two, until the wrinkles in his cheeks began to be blown out a bit, and then, growing bolder as he grew stronger, fairly made a dash across the water, and landing at Glasgow, took the Trosachs by storm.

"And now, gentlemen," cried Mr. Shilletoe, "comes the moral of my story. Jack had been spending a fortnight with great pleasure to himself up in a fishing-hut on Loch Lomond, and had even been doing a little love to a pretty Scotch girl there, just to keep himself in practice, when the wandering mood took him again, and shouldering bag and baggage he marched away from his "Highland Mary," and took up his quarters at the Brig of Allan.

The Brig of Allan, gentlemen, is the finest place in all the world for moon-struck lovers to fly to. Jack was not a lover, but he admired the sex, and that was nearly the same thing, and so Jack found it, for whether it was his cheerful, careless way of doing the thing, his sociability, or his fate, I can't tell, but there was not a day passed over but what he found himself hooked in to some diversion or other by the tourists who had pitched their tents there. At one time it was a boating excursion, and Jack was wanted to take an oar; and now it was a pic-nic up the mountains, with a score or more of highland ponies to carry the lazy sinners; and to one and all Jack was invited, until, what with coming out in a gentlemanly way with the needful at all these affairs, Jack's money began to run very short, and in fact he was as near as a toucher on his beam-ends.

Amongst the company there was a pretty widow, for such Jack thought her at the time, though afterwards he had a shrewd suspicion that she was sailing under false colours all the time, between whom and Dalrymple there soon grew up a most unmistakeable understanding. In the free and easy style of living carried on at the Brig, matters came to a conclusion sooner than they are accustomed to do with us. Jack ogled the widow, and the widow sighed and blushed whenever he squeezed her hand under the table, looked very demure whenever they drank wine together, and always allowed Jack to lead her pony up the hills, and kept a place for the happy dog next her in the boatings, until, at last, every body came to look upon them as all but man and wife, and no more notice was taken of their little flirtations, than if they were a newly-married couple on their wedding jaunt.

Well, all at once, the widow began to grow low-spirited, and took to sighing and so forth, to such an extent that a steam engine of forty-horse power was mere child's play to it. Jack at

first passed it off without much remark, for he fancied that it was all out of love for him, and though he felt rather puzzled how a woman so supremely blessed as she ought to feel herself, in her situation, could display her happiness in such a dismal fashion, he never dreamed how things would fall out, until one day he found her in tears.

Now Jack could not, for the life of him, resist any woman, no matter what she was, when a couple of big pearly tears were coursing each other down her cheeks, and less so than ever when that woman was adored by him to such an extent as the charming widow, and so he caught her in a twinkling in his arms, and after a great many protestations of the most unalterable attachment, insisted on knowing what it was that affected her so much.

"Ah, my dear Mr. Dalrymple," sobbed the pretty widow, putting an elaborately worked cambric handkerchief to her face, as she averted her head from Jack, "I cannot confide even to your sympathising soul the wretched perplexity I am in."

The widow, gentlemen, as you will perceive, had an odd way of talking about the sympathy of the soul, and such like stuff, and though Jack could not, for the life of him, imagine what it meant, he thought it all very fine; for even nonsense sounds wondrously fine coming from a pair of pretty lips, and so Jack squeezed her closer still, and drawing the handkercheief away, insisted upon knowing what ailed her.

"I shall for ever be sunk in your eyes, dear Mr. Dalrymple," sighed the widow, with a fresh outburst.

"Upon my soul, my dear Dora," blurted out Jack, "I think you use me exceedingly ill; if you don't give up this horrible torturing suspense, I'll go and shoot myself."

The widow gave a little scream, and sank into his arms, and Jack somehow or other had his arms round her waist almost without his knowing it.

"You won't shoot yourself, dearest?" sobbed Mrs. Fanloo, clasping his neck.

"Not unless you wish it," said Jack, looking inconceivably fierce, "and provided also you tell your own Dalrymple what ails you."

"And you won't think ill of your own poor Dora?" sighed the widow, in her most honeyed accents.

"I adore you too passionately, dearest, for that," said Jack, stealing a kiss.

"If I should tell you, then, love, that my funds are exhausted," said the widow, fixing her pretty blinkers upon him, partly to melt him by their eloquence, and partly to see how he took the news; "if, dearest Mr. Dalrymple, I should tell you that your own poor Dora," here she let her head fall on his arm after a very pretty fashion, indeed, "has been disappointed of a remittance from her

London banker, and in consequence dreads a thousand horrible misfortunes."

Whatever Jack thought, he looked inconceivably glum.

"Oh, Mr. Dalrymple, I feel that even you misunderstand me," cried the pretty Mrs. Fanloo, with a fresh gush of tears, "even you suspect that I am a mere adventuress. Oh, this is too horrible !"

"Upon my soul I don't," ejaculated Jack, whose suspicions vanished the moment she set the waterworks to work again, “but what can I do? I'm as hard up as you are, or nearly so. Look ye: that's every scrap I have to bless myself with," and he threw one dirty bank-note into her lap.

"What a miserable coincidence!" sighed the widow, looking at Jack.

"What is to be done?" said Jack, looking at the widow.

It was not for the widow to say what was to be done; and so, when Jack looked at her, she only sighed worse than ever, and clasped her little hands in mute despair.

"I'll be bound I owe at least thirty pounds here," muttered Jack, looking over to the widow.

The widow shook her head; she was in the same predicament. "If I were to draw a bill on Old Moulsey," muttered Jack, biting his nails," and get it discounted at Glasgow. That's the only way to get out of the scrape," and when he had come to this conclusion he glanced over to the widow, and snapping his fingers, began to caper about the room in an extremely ridiculous manner. "Have you found a way out of our difficulties?" cried she, looking bewitchingly beautiful through her tears.

"I have! I have, Dora," and Jack had his arms round her waist, again, the scamp, "hi ti iddity! hurra! hurra!" and Jack began to caper about like a March hare in a cornfield, whirling the widow round with him, until a smothered giggling at the keyhole told him that they were watched.

"Mr. Dalrymple, I am ruined!" cried the widow, going off in a dead swoon.

"I'll be shot if you are, for you shall be my wife before you're twenty-four hours older," cried Jack, valorously.

"Oh, John!" murmured the widow.

"I'm a man of my word, ma'am," blurted out Jack, "and so if you're willing, we'll set off to Glasgow to-morrow, and get married, and have the bill cashed."

"Oh, you dear delightful creature!" cried Mrs. Fanloo smothering him with kisses, "what a queer, odd man you are!"

Jack blushed, and led her to a chair, but what passed in the half hour's conversation they had thereafter is of little consequence to detail, further than that on the following day Jack and the widow