enlarge upon the scene. Here was our little party, hidden under the jungly bank, waiting for an accident-heads or tails, right or left-to decide whether or not we should suddenly come into deadly conflict with ten times our number of savages, in pitchy darkness; and there were the invisible devils, perfectly unconscious of our proximity, iterating their monotonous war-noteso near, that we could almost have touched them with our oars. When the tide turned again, the captain overtook us; they had passed him in the

same way.

The little English boy was found, by Tarleton or Neblitt, on the bank, very near where I had landed, wandering about stark naked, and entirely crazy, with little lance wounds, mere scratches, in the fleshy parts of his arms and legs. When I plunged into the stream, he paused to observe what would happen. When he saw how they fired at me, he was afraid to follow, and went down into the hold of the boat, where he hid himself among some hospital traps. On taking possession of the boat, the Burmese rummaged it thoroughly, in search of booty, and found the boy. They dragged him out from among the dhoolies, and took him on deck, where they played with him, and tumbled him about, felt of his limbs, wondered at his skin, laughed over his little clothes, and made game of him generally. With their dhars, they cut off locks of his hair. Then they stood him up against a beam, to try his courage, and threw darts at him-slender, armed reeds, between arrows and lances; with these they grazed

the skin of his arms and legs. At last, the boy became quite maddened with fear, and, suddenly breaking through the very centre of the party, jumped into the river. Swimming down the stream with the tide, he finally landed where the captain found him. He was taken down to the frigate, where he eventually recovered.

Poor Shields! A ball had struck the top of his left shoulder, just inside the collar-bone, and severed a main artery. Although, when we fled, we left his body in the boat, which the Burmese took possession of immediately-and although so high a price was set on British heads, his was spared, nor had the slightest insult, apparently, been offered to his corpse. In the search for plunder, hurried in momentary fear of our return, or of a surprise from some other quarter, they had forgotten their human prize, or feared to seize it. Indeed, their hot haste was evident in the fact that they had even left the flags at the sterns of the boats, although they had made away with the camp-boxes of the officers-among the rest, with one, containing three hundred rupees, brought up by a young ensign, no less verdant than amorous, who had heard of the charms of the maidens of Pegu.

Poor Shields! he sleeps in his loneliness under the shadow of the ShwayMadoo, and the young Yankee sailor's grave was watered by tears as true as ever eyes let fall. In Boston I have sought in vain for his mother. His share of prize-money awaits her order, in the office of the Superintendent of Marine, at Calcutta.

LA

I.

ATE one Saturday afternoon, in a certain December, I sat by a good sea-coal fire, in my office, trying to muster courage enough for an encounter with the cold winds and driving storm outside. Half ashamed to confess my cowardice to myself, I had done every unnecessary thing I could think of to kill time, till, at last, I was reduced to the necessity of counting over the contents of my purse. This, however, was but a brief resource. "A short horse," as the proverb hath it, "is soon curried." The only coin worth lingering on was a bright, new halfeagle, given me that morning by some chance customer, as my recompense for "doing a deed."

Limited as my practice and my fees had always been, half-eagles were not entirely a novelty to me; and yet, from the prolonged attention with which, in my procrastinating frame of mind, I regarded it, a looker-in might have supposed I was studying some rare antique, instead of a very ordinary specimen of Uncle Sam's daily spending-money. I examined it chronologically, with reference to the date, and, geographically, in respect to the mark of the mint whence it issued. I compared the eagle, on the one side, with my remembrance of such ornithological specimens as I had seen in traveling museums, and of the effigy-then solemnly believed to be of solid gold-which, in my boyish days, kept watch and ward over Tommy Townsend's coffee-house. I scrutinized the head of liberty with the eye of a physiognomist; and in attempting, with a sharp-pointed pen-knife, to give the hybrid profile a more feminine

mouth, I accomplished sundry scratches which might very well have passed for a mustache, beside cutting my fingers, and breaking, at once, the knife-blade and the third commandment.

A knock at the door checked the half-uttered malediction, and was only repeated when I cried, "Come in." Had spiritual rappings been invented then, I might have thought that Satan. his patience exhausted by this new development of wickedness, was about to foreclose the mortgage he is popularly supposed to hold on every member of our profession; as it was, I only rose and opened the door. The ruddy firelight streamed out into the dark entry, and fell upon a slight figure that seemed almost the embodiment of its coldness and gloom. The figure, however, was too familiar to me to inspire any supernatural fears, being that of a young woman who earned a scant livelihood by copying for lawyers. Why need I describe her? An employment requiring easy penmanship, and some acquaintance with commas and periods, if not with the more essential parts of composition, falls almost, as a matter of course, to those who, at some period, have had greater advantages-to those who, in that common but more touching phrase, “have known better days." The result is easily guessed. It might be told in many a tale of patient suffering and labor; of bright eyes dimmed with late watching; of red cheeks blanched to the hue of the paper before them; of young hopes withered and shrunk, till they are as lifeless and void of meaning, to the weary heart, as the dry legal phrases of the copy to the tired hand that transcribes them!

And while I had been lingering idly

by my fire, dreading to face the storm, this scantily-clad girl had walked all the way from her distant garret. She did not tell me that she was weary and chilled to the very heart; but I read it in her pinched face, in the frozen sleet which covered her dress of faded mourning, and in the eagerness with which she drew toward the fire, as a starving man would approach food. Ill protected as she was from the storm, she had managed to cover the papers she brought from its drenching, with a care which told, more strongly than any words, the importance to her of the trifling sum she was to receive for the copying. This was the first time I had ever employed her. In fact, I did not often find it necessary to obtain such extraneous aid in getting through my business; and the present occasion was due less to the pressure of my own occupations than to the whims of one of my best clients, who had declared, that he would see me in a still worse place than Wall street, before he would spend time in deciphering my legal chirography, or the school-boy pot-hooks and hangers of my only and very juvenile clerk.

I took the package and ran my eye over its contents. They were written in a neat, plain hand, just stiff enough to show that the consciousness of copying for a lawyer had marred the writer's ease. As copies they were scrupulously correct, and finished even to the numbering of the folios in the margin. I silently reckoned the price, and, as I did, it occurred to me that I could only pay it that evening by the sacrifice of my half-eagle. It was in vain that once more I opened my purse, which, certainly, was not Fortunatus's, for I found nothing more there than I had seen in it an hour before-small change of the very smallest variety. Could I put her off until Monday? Without that halfeagle my Saturday night's marketing would be a very small affair.

She stood, on the other side of the fire-place, as motionless as if she had been a carved pillar, placed there to support the mantel, against which her shoulder rested. One foot-a neat one, even in its worn, wet shoe-peeped from beneath her dress, as if drawn irresistibly toward the grateful warmth. Indeed, her whole attitude seemed to express the same feeling. She did not bend and crouch over the fire as a beggar would have done. She did not sit before it and court its cheerful heat as if it had blazed on her own hearthstone. Scarcely swerving from the most erect position, as she leaned against the marble, her clasped hands hanging before her, she seemed to be bracing herself against an attraction that would draw her completely into the flame. I could almost fancy that, if left to itself, her slender form would be drawn closer and closer, till, finally, it mingled with the flickering blaze, and, with it, passed into viewless air.

But, when I lifted my eyes to her face, I saw that she was, at least, unconscious of the fancied impulse. Her fixed eyes, and a faint smile on her lip, told that some pleasant thought had beguiled her, even there, into a daydream. Following the direction of her gaze, I saw that it rested on the same solitary coin which had been the subject of my own meditations, and which lay just where I had dropped it, on the table, when startled by her knock.

Modern critics are very fond of talking about the suggestive in art and literature. To my own mind (because it is hackneyed and worldly, I suppose they would say), there is no word in the language so suggestive as money-no work of art that brings up so many and so varied thoughts as those very remarkable profiles and effigies which adorn our current coin. Dross in itself, if the philosophers will have it so; yet, as a means, a tool, a path, is it not wonderful in the versatility of its power? What magician ever worked such wonders in the material world? What spirit works so universally, so unfailingly, so unceasingly, in the moral? Even that single coin on my table-that infinitesimal drop in the great ocean of wealth -how much lies within the circumference of such a small piece of metal? To my own mind-worldly and hackneyed as I have before observed-it had been suggestive of a great many

things. Compressed within its disc, I had seen my Sunday dinner, ample, done to a turn, rich with dripping gravy, and smoking hot from the roasting jack. From its metallic rim I had already sipped, in imagination, the rare old Amontillado. A fragment of the gold had curled my lips in fragrant wreaths of smoke. And if I, to whom even half-eagles were not unfrequent visitors, and who, if I had known poverty at all, had known him only as a neighbor to be shunned, and not as an inmate to be fought; who, even in my worst estate, had been spared the pain of seeing him enter at my own door, and sit down with my dear ones at their scant meal; if I could see so much in a half-eagle, what a world-wide prospect of happiness might it not open to that poor girl's eyes? I dared not dwell on the things she might see there, lest I should loathe myself and the well-fed Christian men around me, who so rarely grant such visions to the starved eyesight; but I immediately gave up all thoughts of sending the girl away without her money.

Yes, her money! For hers it was, by all that can make good title in law or equity; earned by the fragment of her young life she had given for it; earned with the very flesh from her wasted frame, and the blood from her pale cheeks.

What business had I to be speculating and sentimentalizing thus about the affairs of a young lady with whom I had only a little business transaction? I might have known that such an unprofessional train of thought would lead to some blunder; the earthen pot and the iron one never can swim safely together, in fact or fable. Consequently, I broke in upon the poor girl's reverie with the most awkward question in the world: Have you any change, miss?"

66

The scarlet blood rushed to her face, as she shook her head; and mine was already on its way there, when I tried to mend the matter by hurrying out:

"No, no, of course you haven't?" And there I stuck; and if ever a middle-aged counselor-at-law felt like a fool, in his own office, I did.

Her eyes were filled with tears at what must have seemed the rudeness of my remark. I could have gone on my knees to ask her pardon, if I had only known in what words to phrase the entreaty. The scene was so embarrassing, that I

cut it short, by pressing the coin into her hand, and telling her that we would make it all right, if she would come for more work, on Monday. Very likely she would have said something in reply; but, not feeling inclined to test my conversational powers further, after such an unlucky beginning, I hastily bade. her good-night, and opened the door.

When her back was fairly turned, I took my candle, and held it at the stairhead, till she had reached the bottom of the last long flight; and then, going back to my arm-chair, wondered what Mrs. Quidam would say to a cold Sunday dinner.

II.

"If that rascally boy of mine has not made a good fire," said I to myself, as I walked down town, the Monday morning following, "I shall certainly give him the thrashing in which I have stood indebted to him so long."

From this novel species of accord and satisfaction, however, the much-thereofdeserving youth was saved by an unexpected incident. Seated by the cheerless and neglected grate, as I entered, I beheld my visitor of the preceding Saturday night. Her pale sad face was even paler and sadder than before, and I thought there were tears in her eyes, and traces of many that had preceded them. But, perhaps, this was owing to the smoke now pouring from the mass of paper and wet wood, with which Tom, as usual, greeted my arrival.

"I am sorry to tell you, sir," she said, after answering my salutation, that the coin you gave me was a bad

one."

A bad one-my beautiful half-eagle a counterfeit! In what of earth can confidence, then, be placed? I took it in my hand; it certainly had every appearance of being genuine.

Positively, you must be mistaken, my dear. I could not be deceived so easily." And feeling that I undoubtedly appeared to her as a gentleman, whom the daily inspection of unlimited gold coin had made a perfect Sir Oracle upon the subject, I drew myself up before the fire,