us he stood for some seconds, before, on the house surgeon asking if
he had found any address, he cast his eyes on the pages which lay open
in his hand.

'Ha! What have you found?--He does not hear! Is it the portrait of
the beloved object? Is it a brother--an enemy--or a debt? But he is
truly transfixed! It is an effect of the Gorgon's head!'

'July 15th, 1860. Received L120.
'L. A. WARD.'

There stood Tom May, like one petrified, deaf to the words around, his
dazzled eyes fixed on the letters, his faculties concentrated in the
endeavour to ascertain whether they were sight or imagination. Yes,
there they were, the very words in the well-known writing, the
school-boy's forming into the clerk's, there was the blot in the top of
the L! Tom's heart gave one wild bound, then all sensation, except the
sight of the writing, ceased, the exclamations of those around him came
surging gradually on his ear, as if from a distance, and he did not yet
hear them distinctly when he replied alertly, almost lightly, 'Here is
a name that surprises me. Let me look at the patient again.'

'No dear friend?' asked his chief intimate, in a tone ready to become
gaiety or sympathy.

'No, indeed,' said Tom, shuddering as he stood over the insensible
wretch, and perceived what it had been which had thrilled him with such
unwonted horror, for, fixed by the paralyzing convulsion of the fatal
blow, he saw the scowl and grin of deadly malevolence that had been the
terror of his childhood, and that had fascinated his eyes at the moment
of Leonard's sentence. Changed by debauchery, defaced by violence,
contorted by the injured brain, the features would scarcely have been
recalled to him but for the frightful expression stamped on his memory
by the miseries of his timid boyhood.

'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.' The
awful thought, answering his own struggle for faith in Divine Justice,
crossed him, as he heard the injury on the head defined, in almost the
same scientific terms that had so often rung on his ears as the causes
of Francis Axworthy's death; but this was no society where he could
give vent to his feelings, and mastering himself with difficulty he
answered, 'I know Him. He is from my own town.'

'Has he friends or relations?'

'Relations, yes,' said Tom, hardly able to restrain a trembling of the
lip, half horror, half irony. 'None here, none near. They shal