rk away!

THE USURER'S GIFT.

A few months ago in London an old man sat in a large paneled room in one
of the streets near Soho-square. Every thing in the apartment was brown
with age and neglect. Nothing more superlatively dingy could well be
imagined. The leathern covers of the chairs were white and glossy at the
edges; the carpet was almost of a uniform tint, notwithstanding its
original gaudy contrasts; there were absurd old engravings upon the
walls--relics of the infancy of the art; and curtains to the windows,
which the smoke of years had darkened from a delicate fawn to a rusty
chocolate color. In the centre of the room, and, as it were, the sun of
this dusty system, stood an office-table of more modern manufacture, at
which was seated the old man alluded to, sole lord and master of the
dismal domicile. He was by profession a money-lender. His age might be
from sixty to sixty-five years; his face was long, and his features
seemed carved out of box-wood or yellow sand-stone, so destitute were
they of mobility; his eyes were of a cold, pale, steel color, but his
brows were black and tufted like a grim old owl's; a long aquiline
nose, a thin and compressed mouth, and a vast double chin, buried in a
voluminous white neckcloth of more than one day's wear, completed the
portrait. Nor did the expression of his countenance undergo any
perceptible change as, after a timid knock, the door opened, and a young
man entered of singularly interesting appearance.

The new-comer was well-dressed, though his clothes were none of the
newest, and had the air of a man accustomed to society. His pale brow
was marked with those long horizontal lines of which time is rarely the
artist. His dark, deep-set gray eyes flashed with a painful brightness;
his long chestnut hair, damp with perspiration, clung in narrow strips
to his forehead; his whole manner implied the man who had made up his
mind to some extraordinary course, from which no wavering or weakness on
_his_ part was likely to turn him aside, whatever the opposition of
others might compel him to abandon or determine. Bending his tall figure
slightly, he addressed the money-lender in a tone of constrained
calmness.

"You lend money, I believe?"

"Sometimes--on good security," replied the usurer, indifferently,
forming a critical summary of his visitor's costume at a glance.

The stranger hesitated: there was a discouraging sort of coldness in the
mode of delivering