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"Particulars! Well, then, Miss Nathalie Renton," he began, with mock gravity, "your professional father is losing some of his oldest patients. Everybody is in ruinous good health; and the grass is growing in the graveyards."

"In the winter-time, papa?-smart grass!"

"Not that I want practice," he went on, getting into soliloquy; "or patients, either. But to have an interloping shedoctor take a family I've attended ten years, out of my hands, and to hear the hodge-podge gabble about physiological laws, and woman's rights, and no taxation without representation, they learn from her-well, it's too bad!"

"Is that all, pa-sy? Seems to me, I'd like to vote, too," was Netty's piquant rejoinder.

66

Hoh! I'll warrant," growled her father. "Hope you'll vote the Whig ticket, Netty, when you get your rights."

66

"Will the Union be dissolved, then, pa-sy-when the Whigs are beaten ?" "Bah! you little plague," he growled, with a laugh. But, then, you women don't know anything about politics. So, there. As I was saying, everything went wrong with me to-day. I've been speculating in rail-road stock, and singed my fingers. Then, old Tom Hollis outbid me, to-day, at Leonard's, on a rare medical work, I had set my eyes upon having. Confound him! Then, again, two of my houses are tenantless, and there are folks in two others that won't pay their rent, and I can't get them out. Out they'll go, though, or I'll know why. And, to crown all-um-m. And I wish the devil had him! as he will.”

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Had who, Beary-papa ?" "Him. I'll tell you. The street floor of one of my houses in Hanoverstreet lets for an oyster-room. keep a bar there, and sell liquor. Last night they had a grand row-a drunken fight, and one man was stabbed, it's thought, fatally."

"Oh, father!" Netty's bright eyes dilated with horror.

"Yes. I hope he won't die. At any rate, there's likely to be a stir about the matter, and my name will be called into question, then, as I'm the landlord. And folks will make a handle of it, and there'll be the very deuce to pay, generally."

He got back the stern, vexed frown, to his face, with the anticipation, and beat the carpet with his foot. The ghost still watched from the angle of the room, and seemed to darken, while its features looked troubled.

"But, father," said Netty, a little tremulously, "I wouldn't let my houses to such people. It's not right; is it? Why, it's horrid to think of men getting drunk, and killing each other!"

Dr. Renton rubbed his hair into disorder, with vexation, and then subsided into solemnity.

"I know it's not exactly right, Netty; but I can't help it. As I said before, I wish the devil had that bar-keeper. I ought to have ordered him out long ago, and then this wouldn't have happened. I've increased his rent twice, hoping to get rid of him so; but he pays without a murmur; and what am I to do? You see, he was an occupant when the building came into my hands, and I let him stay. He pays me a good, round rent; and, apart from his cursed traffic, he's a good tenant. What can I do? It's a good thing for him, and it's a good thing for me, pecuniarily. Confound him. Here's a nice rumpus brewing!"

66

Dear pa, I'm afraid it's not a good thing for you," said Netty, caressing him, and smoothing his tumbled hair. "Nor for him either. I wouldn't mind the rent he pays you. I'd order him out. It's bad money. There's blood on it."

She had grown pale, and her voice quivered. The phantom glided over to them, and laid its spectral hand upon her forehead. The shadowy eyes looked from under the misty hair into the doctor's face, and the pale lips moved as if speaking the words heard only in the silence of his heart-"hear her, hear her!"

"I must think of it," resumed Dr. Renton, coldly. "I'm resolved, at all events, to warn him that, if anything of this kind occurs again, he must quit at once. I dislike to lose a profitable tenant; for no other business would bring me the sum his does. Hang it, everybody does the best he can with his property-why shouldn't I?"

The ghost, standing near them, drooped its head again on its breast, and crossed its arms. Netty was silent. Dr. Renton continued, petulantly:

"A precious set of people I manage

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"Perhaps she can't find one, pa," answered Netty.

"Humbug!" retorted her father; "I know better."

"Pa, dear, if I were you, I'd turn out that rum-seller, and let the poor woman stay a little longer; just a little, pa."

"Shan't do it. Hah! that would be scattering money out of both pockets. Shan't do it. Out she shall go; and, as for him-well, he'd better turn over a new leaf. There let us leave the subject, darling. It vexes me. How did we contrive to get into this train. Bah!"

He drew her closer to him, and kissed her forehead. She sat quietly, with her head on his shoulder, thinking very gravely.

66

"I feel queerly, to-day, little Netty," he began, after a short pause. 'My nerves are all high-strung with the turn matters have taken."

"How is it, papa? The headache?" she answered.

"Ye-s-n-o-not exactly; I don't know," he said dubiously; then, in an absent way, "it was that letter set me to think of him all day, I suppose."

"Why, pa, I declare," cried Netty, starting up, "if I didn't forget all about it, and I came down expressly to give it to you! Where is it? O, here it is."

She drew from her pocket an old letter, faded to a pale yellow, and gave it to him. The ghost started suddenly.

"Why, bless my soul! it's the very letter! Where did you get that, Nathalie ?" asked Dr. Renton.

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"Fifteen years ago, Netty. When you were a baby. And the hand that wrote it has been cold for all that time."

He spoke with a solemn sadness, as if memory lingered with the heart of fifteen years ago, on an old grave. The dim figure by his side had bowed its head, and all was still.

"It is strange," he resumed, speaking vacantly and slowly, "I have not thought of him for so long a time, and to-day-especially this evening-I have felt as if he were constantly near me. It is a singular feeling."

He put his left hand to his forehead, and mused—his right clasped his daughter's shoulder. The phantom slowly raised its head, and gazed at him with a look of unutterable tenderness.

"Who was he, father?" she asked, with a hushed voice.

"A young man-an author-a poet. He had been my friend, when we were boys; and, though I lost sight of him for years he led an erratic life-we were friends when he died. Poor, poor fellow! Well, he is at peace.”

The stern voice had saddened, and was almost tremulous. The spectral form was still.

"How did he die, father?"

"A long story, darling," he replied gravely, "and a sad one. He was very poor and proud. He was a genius -that is, a person without an atom of practical talent. His parents died, the last, his mother, when he was near manhood. I was in college then. Thrown upon the world, he picked up a scanty subsistence with his pen, for a time. I could have got him a place in the counting-house, but he would not take it; in fact, he wasn't fit for it. You can't harness Pegasus to the cart, you know. Besides, he despised mercantile life-without reason, of course; but he was always notional. His love of literature was one of the rocks he

foundered on. He wasn't successful; his best compositions were too delicate -fanciful-to please the popular taste; and then he was full of the radical and fanatical notions which infected so many people at that time in New England, and infect them now, for that matter; and his sublimated, impracticable ideas and principles, which he kept till his dying day, always staved off his chances of success. Consequently, he never rose above the drudgery of some employment on newspapers. Then, he was terribly passionate, not without cause, I confess; but it wasn't wise. What I mean is this: if he saw, or if he fancied he saw, any wrong or injury done to any one, it was enough to throw him into a frenzy; he would get black in the face, and absolutely shriek out his denunciations of the wrong-doer. I do believe he would have visited his own brother with the most unsparing invective, if that brother had laid a harming finger on a street-beggar, or a colored man, or a poor person of any kind. I don't blame the feeling; though, with a man like him, it was very apt to be a false or a mistaken one; but, at any rate, its exhibition wasn't sensible. Well, as I was saying, he buffeted about in this world a long time, poorly paid, fed, and clad; taking more care of other people than he did of himself. Then mental suffering, physical exposure, and want killed him."

The stern voice had grown softer than a child's. The same look of unutterable tenderness brooded on the mournful face of the phantom by his side; but its thin, shining hand was laid upon his head, and its countenance had undergone a change. The form was still undefined; but the features had become distinct. They were those of a young man, beautiful and wan, and marked with great suffering.

A pause had fallen on the conversation, in which the father and daughter heard the solemn sighing of the wintry wind around the dwelling. The silence seemed scarcely broken by the voice of the young girl.

"Dear father, this was very sad. Did you say he died of want?"

"Of want, my child, of hunger and cold. I don't doubt it. He had wandered about, as I gather, houseless for a couple of days and nights. It was in December, too. Some one found him, on a rainy night, lying in the street,

drenched, and burning with fever, and had him taken to the hospital. In his wild ravings he mentioned my name, and they sent for me. That was our first meeting after two years. I found him in the hospital-dying. He was delirious, and never recognized me. And, Nathalie, his hair-it had been coal-black, and he wore it very long, he wouldn't let them cut it either; and, as they knew no skill could save him, they let him have his way-his hair was then as white as snow! God alone knows what that brain must have suffered to blanch hair which had been as black as the wing of a raven!"

He covered his eyes with his hand, and sat silently. The fingers of the phantom still shone dimly on his head, and its white locks drooped above him, like a weft of light.

"What was his name, father?" asked the pitying girl.

"George Feval. The very name

sounds like fever. He died on Christmas eve, fifteen years ago this night. It was on his death-bed, while his mind was tossing on a sea of delirions fancies, that he wrote me this long letter-for, to the last, I was uppermost in his thoughts. It is a wild, incoherent thing, of course-a strange mixture of sense and madness. But I have kept it as a memorial of him. I have not looked at it for years; but this morning I found it among my papers, and, somehow, it has been in my mind all day."

He slowly unfolded the faded sheets, and sadly gazed at the writing. His daughter had risen from her recumbent posture, and now bent her graceful head over the leaves. The phantom covered its face with its hands.

"What a beautiful manuscript it is, father!" she exclaimed. "The writing is faultless."

"It is, indeed," he replied. "Would he had written his life as fairly!"

"Read it, father," said Nathalie. "No-but I'll read you a detached passage here and there," he answered, after a pause. "The rest you may read yourself some time, if you wish. It is painful to me. Here's the beginning:

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•My Dear Charles Renton :-Adieu, and adieu. It is Christmas eve, and I am going home. I am soon to exhale from my flesh, like the spirit of a broken flower. Exultemus forever!'

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'It frightens me," said Nathalie, as he paused.

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We will read no more," he replied sombrely. It belongs to the psychology of madness. To me, who knew him, there are gleams of sense in it, and passages where the delirium of the language is only a transparent veil on the meaning. All the remainder is devoted to what he thought important advice to me. But it's all wild and vague. Poor -poor George !"

The phantom still hid its face in its hands, as the doctor slowly turned over the pages of the letter. Nathalie, bending over the leaves, laid her finger on the last, and asked-"What are those closing sentences, father? Read them."

"O, that is what he called his 'last counsel' to me. It's as wild as the rest -tinctured with the prevailing ideas of his career. First he says, 'Farewellfarewell; then he bids me take his

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counsel into memory on Christmas day;' then, after enumerating all the wretched classes he can think of in the country, he says, 'These are your sisters and your brothers-love them all.' Here he says, 'O friend, strong in wealth for so much good, take my last counsel. In the name of the Saviour, I charge you, be true and tender to all men.' He goes on to bid me live and labor for the fallen, the neglected, the suffering, and the poor;' and finally ends, by advising me to help upset any, or all, institutions, laws, and so forth, that bear hardly on the fag-ends of society; and tells mo that what he calls a service to humanity' is worth more to the doer than a service to anything else, or than anything we can gain from the world. Ah, well! poor George."

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"But isn't all that true father?"said Netty, "it seems so."

"H'm," he murmured through his closed lips. Then, with a vague smile, folding up the letter meanwhile, he said, "Wild words, Netty, wild words. I've no objection to charity, judiciously given; but poor George's notions are not mine. Every man for himself, is a good general rule. Every man for humanity, as George has it, and in his acceptation of the principle, would send us all to the alms-house pretty soon. The greatest good of the greatest number-that's my rule of action. There are plenty of good institutions for the distressed, and I'm willing to help support 'em, and do. But as for making a martyr of one's self, or tilting against the necessary evils of society, or turning philanthropist at large, or any Quixotism of that sort, I don't believe in it. We didn't make the world, and we can't mend it. Poor George. Wellhe's at rest. The world wasn't the place for him."

They grew silent. The spectre glided slowly to the wall, and stood as if it were thinking what, with Dr. Renton's rule of action, was to become of the greatest good of the smallest number. Nathalie sat on her father's knee, thinking only of George Feval, and of his having being starved and grieved to death.

"Father," said Nathalie, softly, "I felt, while you were reading the letter, as if he were near us. Didn't you? The room was so light and still, and the wind sighed so."

"Netty, dear, I've felt that all day, I believe," he replied "hark! there is the door-bell. Off goes the spirit-world, and here comes the actual. Confound it! Some one to see me, I'll warrant, and I'm not in the mood."

He got into a fret at once, Netty was not the Netty of an hour ago, or she would have coaxed him out of it. But she did not notice it now, in her abstraction, she had risen at the tinkle of the bell, and seated herself in a chair. Presently, a nose, with a great pimple on the end of it, appeared at the edge of the door, and a weak, piping voice said," there was a woman wanted to see you, sir."

"Who is it, James ?-no matter, show her in."

He got up with the vexed scowl on his face, and walked the room. In a minute

the library door opened again, and a pale, thin, rigid, frozen-looking, little woman, scantily clad, the weather being considered, entered, and dropped a curt, awkward bow to Dr. Renton." "O-Mrs. Miller. Good evening, ma'am. Sit down," he said, with a cold, constrained civility.

The little woman faintly said, "Good evening, Dr. Renton," and sat down stiffly, with her hands crossed before her, in the chair nearest the wall. This was the obdurate tenant, who had paid no rent for three months, and had a notice to quit, expiring to-morrow.

"Cold evening, ma'am," remarked Dr. Renton, in his hard way.

"Yes, sir, it is," was the cowed, awkward answer.

"Won't you sit near the fire, ma'am,” said Netty, gently, "you look cold." "No, miss, thank you. I'm not cold," was the faint reply. She was cold, though, as well she might be with her poor, thin shawl, and open bonnet, in such a bitter night as it was outside. And there was a rigid, sharp, suffering look in her pinched features that betokened she might have been hungry,

too.

"Poor people don't mind the cold weather, miss," she said, with a weak smile, her voice getting a little stronger. "They have to bear it, and they get used to it."

She had not evidently borne it long enough to effect the point of indifference. Netty looked at her with a tender pity. Dr. Renton thought to himself-Hoh! -blazoning her poverty-manufacturing sympathy already--the old trickand steeled himself against any attacks of that kind, looking jealously, meanwhile, at Netty.

66 Well, Mrs. Miller," he said, “what is it this evening? I suppose you've brought me my rent."

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The little woman grew paler, and her voice seemed to fail on her quivering lips. Netty cast a quick, beseeching look at her father.

Nathalie, please to leave the room." We'll have no nonsense carried on here, he thought, triumphantly, as Netty rose, and obeyed the stern, decisive order, leaving the door ajar behind her.

He seated himself in his chair, and resolutely put his right leg up to rest on his left knee. He did not look at his tenant's face, determined that her piteous expressions (got up for the oc

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