seas in which he was now voyaging as a review of
these various anxieties. I have thrown them (for the reader's
convenience) into a certain order; but in the mind of one poor human
equal they whirled together like the dust of hurricanes. With the same
obliging preoccupation, I have put a name to each of his distresses; and
it will be observed with pity that every individual item would have
graced and commended the cover of a railway novel.

Anxiety the First: _Where is the Body? or, The Mystery of Bent Pitman._
It was now manifestly plain that Bent Pitman (as was to be looked for
from his ominous appellation) belonged to the darker order of the
criminal class. An honest man would not have cashed the bill; a humane
man would not have accepted in silence the tragic contents of the
water-butt; a man, who was not already up to the hilts in gore, would
have lacked the means of secretly disposing them. This process of
reasoning left a horrid image of the monster, Pitman. Doubtless he had
long ago disposed of the body--dropping it through a trap-door in his
back kitchen, Morris supposed, with some hazy recollection of a picture
in a penny dreadful; and doubtless the man now lived in wanton splendour
on the proceeds of the bill. So far, all was peace. But with the
profligate habits of a man like Bent Pitman (who was no doubt a
hunchback in the bargain), eight hundred pounds could be easily melted
in a week. When they were gone, what would he be likely to do next? A
hell-like voice in Morris's own bosom gave the answer: "Blackmail me."

Anxiety the Second: _The Fraud of the Tontine; or, Is my Uncle dead?_
This, on which all Morris's hopes depended, was yet a question. He had
tried to bully Teena; he had tried to bribe her; and nothing came of it.
He had his moral conviction still; but you cannot blackmail a sharp
lawyer on a moral conviction. And besides, since his interview with
Michael, the idea wore a less attractive countenance. Was Michael the
man to be blackmailed? and was Morris the man to do it? Grave
considerations. "It's not that I'm afraid of him," Morris so far
condescended to reassure himself; "but I must be very certain of my
ground, and the deuce of it is, I see no way. How unlike is life to
novels! I wouldn't have even begun this business in a novel, but what
I'd have met a dark, slouching fellow in the Oxford Road, who'd have
become my accomplice, and known all about how to do it, and probably
broken into Micha