together with egregious glee—" let us lose no more time, but begin the feast as well as we may, though we want the lady at the head of the table, and the joint at the bottom. Mr. Wouter Weegschaal (bless him for his uxoriousness! but curse him for his clumsiness!), has not only deprived me of my rib, but my sirloin. If you can do without the one, I promise you I can do without the other but to show that I have not forgotten her, I beg to propose, before a mouthful be eaten, that we all drink her health in a bumper."

To humour their host, his guests cheerfully complied with his request. The banquet thus auspiciously begun was kept up with most hilarious mirth; the claret, liberated from the hand that had hitherto stinted its supply, passed rapidly and merrily round; and Sir John, who repeatedly declared that to have his estate and his son restored to him, and his wife taken from him, all at the same time, were such special blessings as called upon him to be sober and

grateful for the remainder of his life, sang scraps of all his old songs, and joked, and thanked Heaven for his good luck, and chuckled, and tippled, until he was finally conveyed to bed in a state that threatened very ominously for the gout, should he continue to exercise his recovered authority over the claret-celler with similar indiscretion.

The guests had all retired, the clamour and merriment had subsided into the quietude that usually invested the dull precincts of the moated house, and the family were about to separate for the night, when loud shrieks were suddenly heard from without, and some of the servants, who had hurried to the spot, came running back to Wouter Weegschaal in great consternation, to inform him that his wife had fallen into the moat, imploring him to hasten to her assistance, as she was so corpulent and heavy that they could not raise her." Ja, ja," said Weegschaal,—“I won't lose a moment.—I'll just light my pipe, and get a drop of something

warm, for the night air's raw, and be with you in a twinkling." After these indispensable preparations for saving his wife, he walked to the moat, where his vigorous arm, soon extricating her from the mud and water in which she was immersed, enabled him to discover the cause of the accident, and at the same time to claim, or rather to seize a reward for his services, which his tardy exertions in her behalf had scarcely merited.

In a hole of the moat-wall, which had formerly served as a drain, this sordid and avaricious woman had concealed a small iron box, to which, for some years past, she had been in the habit of stealing in the dark to deposit her hoardings. So secret had been her proceedings, that she had hitherto pursued this course without detection; and so diligently had she scraped and pilfered, that the box was nearly filled with gold, and was of course proportionably heavy. Her first thought, after having so unexpectedly discovered her husband, was the security of her

hidden treasure: presuming that she would be immediately ejected from her present abode, and taking it also for granted that Sir John would lay an embargo on the contents of her strong box, if he detected it, she began to be apprehensive that all would be lost, unless she could immediately effect its removal; and with this intention she had betaken herself to the place of its concealment. Had she accomplished her purpose, her husband would in all probability have remained as ignorant of her wealth as Sir John had been; but the weight of the box proved too much for her strength, and she rolled with her treasure into the moat: by abandoning the box she might have easily floundered out; but being of Shylock's opinion, that they might as well take her life as that whereby she lived, she clung to her beloved gold, and plunged and struggled, until she became so completely imbedded in the mud, as to be obliged to call aloud for help. To the last, however, she retained her clutch of the handle, although she

was so exhausted, upon being pulled up from the moat, that her husband easily loosened her fingers from their grasp, and took upon himself the trouble of carrying off the weighty strong box, which he forthwith locked up in a cupboard, and put the key in his own pocket.

That we may not have occasion to recur to this Dutch couple, we may as well despatch the remainder of their history at once, by stating that when Weegschaal found himself so suddenly enriched by Sir John's permitting him to retain the money thus secured from his wife's grasp, he very naturally determined to quit service, and immediately set off for Holland with his vrouw, loaded with additional gifts from Jocelyn and Julia. Scarcely had Juffrouw Weegschaal set foot on her native land, when the violent cold she had caught from her immersion in the moat, being aggravated by the voyage, and the moist fogs she encountered upon her arrival, produced an inflammation of the chest, which in a few days carried her off. There