tment has dried up his better nature; his heart is wrung with
the shafts of ingratitude--all the fierce passions of his nature, hate,
scorn and revenge, rise up in the one stormy outburst of his soul. He
casts upon her a look of withering scorn, the past of that life so
chequered flashes vividly through his thoughts, his hate deepens, he
hurls her from him, invokes a curse upon her head, and shuts her from
his sight. "Mine will be the retribution!" he says, knitting his dark
brow.

How is it with the Judge--that high functionary who provides thus
sumptuously for his mistress? His morals, like his judgments, are
excused, in the cheap quality of our social morality.

Such is gilded vice; such is humble virtue.

A few days more and the term of the Sessions commences. George is
arraigned, and the honorable Mr. Snivel, who laid the plot, and
furthered the crime, now appears as a principal witness. He procures the
man's conviction, and listens with guilty heart to the sentence, for he
is rearraigned on sentence day, and Mr. Snivel is present. And while
the culprit is sentenced to two years imprisonment, and to receive
eighty lashes, laid on his bare back, while at the public whipping-post,
at four stated times, the man who stimulated the hand of the criminal,
is honored and flattered by society. Such is the majesty of the law.

CHAPTER XXXV.

IN WHICH A LITTLE LIGHT IS SHED UPON THE CHARACTER OF OUR CHIVALRY.

Mr. McArthur has jogged on, in the good old way but his worldly store
seems not to increase. The time, nevertheless, is arrived when he is
expected to return the little amount borrowed of Keepum, through the
agency of Mr. Snivel. Again and again has he been notified that he must
pay or go to that place in which we lock up all our very estimable
"first families," whose money has taken wings and flown away. Not
content with this, the two worthy gentlemen have more than once invaded
the Antiquary's back parlor, and offered, as we have described in a
former chapter, improper advances to his daughter.

Mr. Keepum, dressed in a flashy coat, his sharp, mercenary face, hectic
of night revels, and his small but wicked eyes wandering over Mr.
McArthur's stock in trade, is seen in pursuit of his darling object. "I
don't mind so much about the pay, old man! I'm up well in the world. The
fact is, I am esteemed--and I am!--a public benefactor. I never forget
how much we owe to the chivalric spirit of our ancestors, and