or he suspected that the other's speech was intended as a prelude to something more demonstrative, and resolved to anticipate him. At any rate, his only answer was a practical one. Stepping back half a pace, he let fly a tremendous left-hander at the doctor. Whether he "slung his hand up from the hip," as seems to be the fashion nowadays, or struck straight out from the shoulder, as they used to say in my time, I will not pretend to say; but it was certainly a "sockdologer," and rendered all the more effective by the big society ring which adorned Bill's little finger, and now left its impress very legible under the doctor's eye.

White was too angry, and perhaps also too much out of practice (that kind of practice) to make a regular boxing match of it. He threw himself, "quite promiscuously," upon Bedlow; the men clinched, and would have gone off into a rough and tumble, had not the five or six of the company nearest promptly interfered. The feeling among all respectable classes at the North leads them to stop combatants rather than form a ring for them. The belligerents were speedily pulled apart and pacified by their respective friends.

The disturbance was over almost as soon as it began; indeed, a stranger who had arrived five minutes after the blow was struck would not have suspected that anything unusual had taken place, unless he had noticed the doctor's black eye, or his antagonist's ruffled plumage. In no part of Anglo-Saxondom is the Anglo-Saxon calm on occasions of difficulty or danger more conspicuous than in the northern states of the Union; and it often serves them in good stead.

Our Tontine party, therefore, broke up very quietly. Everybody was supposed to have held his tongue, and, as duelling is not a custom of the northern states (never having been since Burr shot Hamilton), nobody supposed that the affray would have any further consequences. But, two or three days after, the rumour spread rapidly that Dr. White, probably over-advised by some of his friends, had laid an information No. 16.-VOL. III.

against Bedlow, and that the pugnacious student was summoned to appear next morning at eleven before old Justice Atwater, there to answer to the charge of assault and battery, breach of the peace, &c. &c.

Old Atwater was one of the few remaining relics of a type and generation then nearly, and possibly by this time quite, extinct. He wore long worsted stockings and knee-breeches-the latter a most uncommon sight in America, where, for lack of "cross-country" habits and habiliments, a man may very well live all his life without seeing any other species of "continuations" except the ordinary pantaloons. He was obviously of "the old school," yet by no means the clean, well-brushed, neatly got-up figure that early reading and tradition leads one to associate with the idea of the old school. Indeed, he might rather have been described by the epithets which tourists are wont to apply to Italian monks and other picturesque mendicants-" venerable but dirty,"-only he did not carry either adjective to the extent that they do.

I had seen a good deal of the justice during my Freshman year at a boardinghouse which he used to frequent. As I was then a youth fresh from the city, with no experience out of it, he seemed to me a most extraordinary animal. His language was as odd as his dress. When he asked if such a one was a fore-handed farmer, I, in my greenness, wondered if any of the Connecticut cultivators were really quadrumanous. All manner of vegetables he indifferently denominated sarce (sauce); and his pronunciation deviated even more from the Johnsonian standard than the specimen of modern New-English in the "Biglow Papers."

The locality of Justice Atwater's court was as primitive and unpretending as his own personal appearance. It was a small office very partially and roughly portioned off from, and opening into, the grocery store of his relative, Mr. Horace Atwater.

A Yankee grocery, or a Yankee "notion store," is an epitome of almost

T

intended perhaps for a window, but quite unfurnished with sashes. The wooden clock in the office and several of the wooden clocks in the grocery, struck the hour of eleven at various intervals during a period of five minutes, but the hero of the day was not forthcoming. At length there was a stir; the outside wave of loafers parted, and in strutted—not Bedlow, but Tom Johnson, another of our New York swells. Perceiving that all the front places were taken, the new-comer vaulted over the head of one of his acquaintances, clambered upon an old stove which stood sentry in one corner, perched himself on the top of it and sat there with his legs crossed, looking down lovingly at his small feet which were encased in drab bottines, almost too delicate for a lady's wear.

Ten minutes more and no defendant. It was a clear case of contempt of court, and the constabulary force was despatched to arrest the offender. The constabulary force of New Haven consisted of one man; he was a middleaged tailor with a large family; we all looked at one another with a smile and a common appreciation of the chance of his fetching Bedlow in case Bill should not be willing to come. Our anticipations were perfectly realized, for in less than a quarter of an hour, Mr. Tryon reappeared-alone. Bill then boarded at the Tontine and was accustomed to order breakfast in his room, another very aristocratic habit of his. The constable had found the door locked, and, on his intimating his errand through the keyhole, Bill had given him some very bad advice through the same channel. Mr. Tryon, whose position as a member of the Church prohibited him from visiting the locality recommended by Bedlow, came incontinently back to court-an indirect reflection on the justice which that functionary did not detect-and reported his non-progress.

It was a

case not of non inventus exactly, but, to use a phrase of Texan law, non comeatibus. For some minutes more things remained at a dead-lock. Old Atwater beckoned to the counsel for the state,

Mr. Higgins, and whispered something to him. "He's going to call out the posse comitatus," said one of us; but Higgins, who had recognised me as a friend of the delinquent, applied to me to act as ambassador.

"Mr. Benson," said he, "will you have the goodness to step round to Mr. Bedlow and ask him if he can't contrive for once to finish his breakfast by half-past eleven, and not keep us waiting till dinner-time?"

Of course I assented, and, after duly charging a neighbour to keep my place," made the best of my way through the crowd; but I had hardly gone ten steps in the street when my journey was cut short by meeting the object of it. Bedlow took the last whiff of his cigar at the door, spit out the stump into the mouth of a stray cur, swaggered into the grocery, uncovered himself by a nod that made his cap fall off, took one hand out of his pockets just in time to catch it, elbowed the throng right and left, and dropped into a chair near the bar which a friend had instantly vacated for him. He was more dressed and looked more impudent than ever. The rear rank of students stood up on their benches; the town-loafers nearly got upon one another's shoulders. The whole audience raised itself on the stilts of expectation and stretched out the neck of anxiety.

Higgins opened the case in a "neat and appropriate" speech, setting forth the enormity of the assault. Under ordinary circumstances he might have indulged in a bit of demagogueism against the students, but our comrade's known democracy (in politics) cut off that resource. The doctor was then examined, and stated the circumstances of the scuffle. Bill, in defiance of the proverb about the man who is his own lawyer, had undertaken to manage his case himself. He cross-examined White pretty sharply, with the view of making it appear that the doctor had used expressions calculated to provoke a breach of the peace; but the attempt was not very successful. Bedlow then rose to address the court in his own defence. This was the great feature of the pro

gramme.

Bill's early reputation as a wit had not been forgotten, and most of us expected that he would turn the whole thing into a farce. Quiet ridicule of the doctor's pretensions to cure the body politic, jokes slily insinuated at the majesty of the court, a mock-heroic introduction of the eagle and the lion, and possibly some other beasts of the world's menagerie-such were our anticipations.

They were doomed to disappointment. Bedlow, to use one of our own slang phrases, got upon the high notes. He altogether mistook his line. He began by quoting Horace to the great edification of the "town-loafers;" he went on to assume a difference of position between himself and the doctor which would have been untenable in the eyes of the law had he been a member of the privileged class in a country of privileged classes, and under actual circumstances was simply insufferable. Our party looked blank; Higgins sneered; Bill saw that he was "putting his foot into it," and his habitual self-possession seemed on the point of failing him. At that moment his good genius came to his relief and created a diversion.

Four students were standing together on a small bench in the front row. The court furniture was not of the newest description, and probably never intended to be put to such a use. Quite unequal to the occasion, the ancient movable relaxed its joints. The supports spread slowly out on each side, and the four men were gradually let down upon the uncarpeted and unswept floor amid a cloud of dust and sundry strong interjections.

The audience were slightly hilarious. Bedlow joined in the laugh, observing that he "really didn't suspect his oratory was so efficacious." The justice, aroused by the damage done to his furniture, raised a lusty cry of "Order!" which was feebly echoed by the constabulary force. Johnson, from his perch on the stove made a dumb show of applauding with his kid-gloved hands. Rash youth! In a moment of forgetfulness he lost his balance, tried to

recover it with a desperate wriggle, slid further down, finally clutched at the stove-pipe to save himself; and just succeeded in pulling the crazy machine. after him upon the crowd below.

Tom, brought up on the toes of the man immediately under him, commenced an apology, supposing the pedal extremities upon which he had lighted to be those of a fellow student; then, finding his mistake, for the injured party was a "town-loafer" who had managed to squeeze into the front, he changed his tone, and began to curse him stoutly for being in the way. The stove-pipe was not so speedily arrested on its travels. Johnson's struggles had cast it quite loose on society, and it continued to circulate erratically, bruising shins, upsetting chairs, and causing men to back over one another, till it made its final rotation in front of Bedlow, and came to rest at his feet, as if to do him honour. "Damnation!" ejaculated old Atwater, starting off his seat, and losing head and temper together, at this fresh devastation committed on his property.

Bill's voice was heard amid the confusion suggesting that there was a fine "made and provided" against profane swearing in public.

The justice threatened to clear the court. How to do it might have puzzled him, even supposing the attorney for the prosecution had united his forces with those of the tailor-constable. However, something like order was speedily restored, and the old fellow then cut short any further attempts at harangue on Bedlow's part, pronouncing the assault fully proved, and inflicting "the highest penalty of the law," namely, a fine of seven dollars.

"I say, boys," quoth the incorrigible Bill," which of you has seven dollars to lend me?" He had come, doubtless out of pure bravado, without a cent in his pocket.

And now it looked as if the problem how the court could be cleared was to receive its solution, so general was the retrograde movement. I have said that we were not famous for having much ready money about us, and our state of

impecuniosity was pretty legible on most of our faces. To have been committed in default of payment would rather have turned the tables on our friend and the joke against him. At length, after due consultation, myself and Johnson mustered two five-dollar gold pieces between us, out of which sum we discharged the fine, plus fifty cents costs.

It was whispered that this would be only the preliminary step to a more serious civil suit for damages on the doctor's part. That, however, never

came off. A few months after circumstances compelled me to leave the law school, and I lost sight of Bedlow, as indeed of most of my associates. Once I heard dimly that he had been aide-decamp to the Governor of New York, and

had sported the handsomest uniform and best horse of the procession on that occasion; afterwards that, during a political tour, he had fallen in love, married a country girl, forsaken his profession and the chances of a public career, and settled down as a gentleman-farmer somewhere " up the river." Six years later, happening to be up the river myself, I accidentally encountered Bill at a dinnerparty. He wore an old cutaway, and his boots might be described as a compromise between clean and dirty. He had a houseful of children, was a great authority on the price of apples, and talked seriously of "taking the law of" a neighbour who had trespassed on his grounds.

CHAPTER IV.

FATHER MACKWORTH.

I HAVE noticed that the sayings and doings of young gentlemen, before they come to the age of, say seven or eight, are hardly interesting to any but their immediate relations and friends. I have my eye, at this moment, on a young gentleman of the mature age of two, the instances of whose sagacity and eloquence are of greater importance, and certainly more pleasant to me, than the projects of Napoleon, or the orations of Bright. And yet I fear that even his most brilliant joke, if committed to paper, would fall dead upon the public ear; and so for the present I shall leave Charles Ravenshoe to the care of Nora, and pass on to some others who demand our attention more.

The first thing which John Mackworth remembered was his being left in the loge of a French school at Rouen by an English footman. Trying to push back his memory farther, he always

failed to conjure up any previous recollection to that. He had certainly a very indistinct one of having been happier, and having lived quietly in pleasant country places with a kind woman who talked English; but his first decided impression always remained the same-that of being, at six years old, left friendless, alone, among twenty or thirty French boys older than himself.

His was a cruel fate. He would have been happier apprenticed to a collier. If the man who sent him there had wished to inflict the heaviest conceivable punishment on the poor, unconscious, little innocent, he could have done no more than simply left him at that school. (Mackworth was long before he found out who was his benefactor-with all his cleverness he was long in finding out that. When he got into the world again he soon knew whose livery the footman who brought him wore, but he was quickly abroad again, completely baffled.) English boys are sometimes brutal to one another, (though not so often as some wish to make out,) and are always rough. Yet