ection in a sequel, or second part. You will
scarce suggest that there can be any end to the newspaper; and you will
certainly never convince me that the author, who cannot be entirely
without sense, would have been at so great pains with my intelligence,
gallant exterior, and happy and natural speech, merely to kick me hither
and thither for two or three paltry chapters and then drop me at the end
like a dumb personage. I know you priests are often infidels in secret.
Pray, do you believe in an author at all?"

"Many do not, I am aware," replied the General softly; "even in the last
chapter we encountered one, the self-righteous David Hume, who goes so
far as to doubt the existence of the newspaper in which our adventures
are now appearing; but it would neither become my cloth, nor do credit
to my great experience, were I to meddle with these dangerous opinions.
My alarm for you is not metaphysical, it is moral in its origin: You
must be aware, my poor friend, that you are a very bad character--the
worst indeed that I have met with in these pages. The author hates you,
Count; and difficult as it may be to connect the idea of
immortality--or, in plain terms, of a sequel--with the paper and
printer's ink of which your humanity is made, it is yet more difficult
to foresee anything but punishment and pain for one who is justly
hateful in the eyes of his creator."

"You take for granted many things that I shall not easily be persuaded
to allow," replied the villain. "Do you really so far deceive yourself
in your imagination as to fancy that the author is a friend to good?
Read; read the book in which you figure; and you will soon disown such
crude vulgarities. Lelio is a good character; yet only two chapters ago
we left him in a fine predicament. His old servant was a model of the
virtues, yet did he not miserably perish in that ambuscade upon the road
to Poitiers? And as for the family of the bankrupt merchant, how is it
possible for greater moral qualities to be alive with more irremediable
misfortunes? And yet you continue to misrepresent an author to yourself,
as a deity devoted to virtue and inimical to vice? Pray, if you have no
pride in your own intellectual credit for yourself, spare at least the
sensibilities of your associates."

"The purposes of the serial story," answered the Priest, "are, doubtless
for some wise reason, hidden from those who act in it. To this
limitation we must bow. But I ask every character