Disease shall set her stamp upon your frame.
The worm shall batten upon your heart. You shall have honours and enjoy
them not; you shall gain your ambition, and despair; you shall pine for
your son, and find him not; or, if you find him, you shall curse the
hour in which he was born. Mark me, man,--I am dying while I speak,--I
know that I am a prophet in my curse. From this hour I am avenged, and
you are my scorn!"

As the hardest natures sink appalled before the stony eye of the maniac,
so, in the dead of the night, pinioned by ruffians, the wild and solemn
voice, sharpened by passion and partial madness, of the ghastly figure
before him curdling through his veins, even the haughty and daring
character of William Brandon quailed! He uttered not a word. He was
found the next morning bound by strong cords to his bed. He spoke not
when he was released, but went in silence to his child's chamber,--the
child was gone! Several articles of property were also stolen; the
desperate tools the mother had employed worked not perhaps without their
own reward.

We need scarcely add that Brandon set every engine and channel of
justice in motion for the discovery of his son. All the especial
shrewdness and keenness of his own character, aided by his professional
experience, he employed for years in the same pursuit. Every research
was wholly in vain; not the remotest vestige towards discovery could
be traced until were found (we have recorded when) some of the articles
that had been stolen. Fate treasured in her gloomy womb, altogether
undescried by man, the hour and the scene in which the most ardent wish
of William Brandon was to be realized.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

O Fortuna, viris invida fortibus
Quam non aqua bonis praemia dividis.
SENECA.
............
And as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew.
............
Here, to the houseless child of want,
My door is open still.
GOLDSMITH.

Slowly for Lucy waned the weeks of a winter which to her was the most
dreary portion of life she had ever passed. It became the time for the
judge to attend one of those periodical visitations so fraught with
dread and dismay to the miserable inmates of the dark abodes which the
complex