before his eyes to shut out the sight, and two minutes after, lifted his head again, and said, in a hoarse but vehement whisper,--

`And yet I must! Huntingdon, get me a glass.!'

`Take the bottle, man! said I, thrusting the brandy-bottle into his hand--but stop, I'm telling too much,' muttered the narrator, startled at the look I turned upon him. `But no matter,' he recklessly added, and thus continued his relation--`In his desperate eagerness, he seized the bottle and sucked away, till he suddenly dropped from his chair, disappearing under the table amid a tempest of applause. The consequence of this imprudence was something like an apoplectic fit, followed by a rather severe brain fever--'

`And what did you think of yourself, sir?' said I, quickly.

`Of course, I was very penitent,' he replied. `I went to see him once or twice--nay, twice or thrice--or, by'r Lady, some four times,--and when he got better, I tenderly brought him back to the fold.'

`What do you mean?'

`I mean, I restored him to the bosom of the club, and compassionating the feebleness of his health and extreme lowness of his spirits, I recommended him to `take a little wine for his stomachs sake,' and, when he was sufficiently re-established, to embrace the media-via, ni-jamais-ni-toujours plan--not to kill himself like a fool, and not to abstain like a ninny--in a word, to enjoy himself like a rational creature, and do as I did;--for don't think, Helen, that I'm a tippler; I'm nothing at all of the kind, and never was, and never shall be. I value my comfort far too much. I see that a man Cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one half his days and mad the other;--besides, I like to enjoy my life at all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers himself to be the slave of a single propensity--and moreover, drinking spoils one's good looks,' he concluded, with a most conceited smile that ought to have provoked me more than it did.

`And did Lord Lowborough profit by your advice?' I asked.

`Why, yes, in a manner. For a while, he managed very well; indeed, he was a model of moderation and prudence--something too much so for the tastes of our wild community;--but, some how, Lowborough had not the gift of moderation: If he stumbled a little to one side, he must go down before he could right himself: if he overshot the mark one night, the effects of it rendered him so miserable the next day that he must repeat the offence to mend it; and so on from day to day, till his clamorous conscience brought him to a stand.--And then, in his sober moments, he so bothered his friends with his remorse, and his terrors and woes, that they were obliged, in self-defence, to get him to drown his sorrows in wine, or any more potent beverage that came to hand; and when his first scruples of conscience were overcome, he would need no more persuading, he would often grow desperate, and be as great a blackguard as any of them could desire--but only to lament his own unutterable wickedness and degradation the more when the fit was over.

`At last, one day when he and I were alone together, after pondering awhile in one of his gloomy, abstracted moods, with his arms folded and his head sunk on his breast,--he suddenly woke up, and vehemently grasping my arm, said,--

`Huntingdon, this won't do! I'm resolved to have done with it.'

`What, are you going to shoot yourself?' said I.

`No; I'm going to reform,'

`Oh, that's nothing new] You've been going to reform these twelve months and more.'