d of a dog drinking coffee?"

"I did," replied the old villain, with another grin, "and many a time
it is newly sweetened for them, too, and they take it until they fall
asleep; but they forget to waken somehow. Taste that yourself, and
you'll find that it is beautifully sweetened; because if it was given to
the dog in its natural bitter state he might refuse to take it at all,
or, what would be worse and more dangerous still, he might suspect the
reason why it was given to him."

The two persons looked each other in the face, and it would, indeed,
be difficult to witness such an expression as the countenance of each
betrayed. That of the herbalist lay principally in his ferret eyes. It
was cruel, selfish, cunning, and avaricious. The eye of the other was
dark, significant, vindictive, and terrible. In his handsome features
there was, when contrasted with those of the herbalist, a demoniacal
elevation, a satanic intellectuality of expression, which rendered the
contrast striking beyond belief. The one appeared with the power of
Apollyon, the god of destruction, conscious of that power; the other
as his mere contemptible agent of evil-subordinate, low, villanous, and
wicked.

Woodward, after a significant look, bade him good night, and took his
way home.

Barney Casey, however, still dogged him stealthily, because he knew not
whether the dose was intended for Grace Davoren or his brother Charles.
Mrs. Lindsay had made no secret of her intention to leave her property
to the latter, whose danger, and the state of whose health, had awakened
all those affections of the mother which had lain dormant in her heart
so long. The revivification of her affections for him was one of those
capricious manifestations of feeling which can emanate from no other
source but the heart of a mother. Independently of this, there was in
the mind of Mrs. Lindsay a principle of conscious guilt, of hardness of
heart, of all want of common humanity, that sometimes startled her into
terror. She knew the villany of her son Woodward, and, after all, the
heart of a woman and a mother is not like the heart of a man. There is a
tendency to recuperation in a woman's and a mother's heart, which can
be found nowhere else; and the contrast which she felt herself forced
to institute between the generous character of her son Charles and the
villany of Woodward broke down the hard propensities of her spirit, and
subdued her very wickedness into something li