ld not be
alienated from his nearest kin. Was not Dalibard the nearest?

These hopes and speculations did not, as we have seen, absorb the
restless and rank energies of Dalibard's crooked, but capacious and
grasping intellect. Patiently and ingeniously he pursued his main
political object,--the detection of that audacious and complicated
conspiracy against the First Consul, which ended in the tragic deaths of
Pichegru, the Duc d'Enghien, and the erring but illustrious hero of La
Vendee, George Cadoudal. In the midst of these dark plots for personal
aggrandizement and political fortune, we leave, for the moment, the
sombre, sullen soul of Olivier Dalibard.

Time has passed on, and spring is over the world. The seeds buried
in the earth burst to flower; but man's breast knoweth not the sweet
division of the seasons. In winter or summer, autumn or spring alike,
his thoughts sow the germs of his actions, and day after day his destiny
gathers in her harvests.

The joy-bells ring clear through the groves of Laughton,--an heir is
born to the old name and fair lands of St. John. And, as usual, the
present race welcomes merrily in that which shall succeed and replace
it,--that which shall thrust the enjoyers down into the black graves,
and wrest from them the pleasant goods of the world. The joy-bell of
birth is a note of warning to the knell for the dead; it wakes the
worms beneath the mould: the new-born, every year that it grows and
flourishes, speeds the parent to their feast. Yet who can predict that
the infant shall become the heir? Who can tell that Death sits not side
by side with the nurse at the cradle? Can the mother's hand measure out
the woof of the Parcae, or the father's eye detect through the darkness
of the morrow the gleam of the fatal shears?

It is market-day at a town in the midland districts of England. There
Trade takes its healthiest and most animated form. You see not the
stunted form and hollow eye of the mechanic,--poor slave of
the capitalist, poor agent and victim of the arch disequalizer,
Civilization. There strides the burly form of the farmer; there waits
the ruddy hind with his flock; there, patient, sits the miller with his
samples of corn; there, in the booths, gleam the humble wares which form
the luxuries of cottage and farm. The thronging of men, and the clacking
of whips, and the dull sound of wagon or dray, that parts the crowd as
it passes, and the lowing of herds and the bleating of