, as its full significance flashed upon her,
screamed with convulsive joy, and I thought must have fainted from excess
of emotion. The Rev. John Hayley returned audible thanks to God in a
voice quivering with rapture, and Miss Hayley ran out of the apartment,
and presently returned with the children, who were immediately
half-smothered with their mother's ecstatic kisses. All was for a few
minutes bewilderment, joy, rapture! Flint persisted to his dying day,
that Lady Seyton threw her arms round his neck, and kissed his bald old
forehead. This, however, I cannot personally vouch for, as my attention
was engaged at the moment by the adverse claimant, the Honorable James
Kingston, who exhibited one of the most irresistibly comic, wo-begone,
lackadaisical aspects it is possible to conceive. He made a hurried and
most undignified exit, and was immediately followed by the discomfited
"family" solicitors. Chilton was conveyed to a station-house, and the
next day was fully committed for trial. He was convicted at the next
sessions, and sentenced to seven years' transportation; and the
"celebrated" firm of Flint and Sharp, derived considerable lustre, and
more profit, from this successful stroke of professional dexterity.

JANE ECCLES

The criminal business of the office was, during the first three or four
years of our partnership, entirely superintended by Mr. Flint; he being
more _an fait_, from early practice, than myself in the art and mystery
of prosecuting and defending felons, and I was thus happily relieved of
duties which, in the days when George III. was king, were frequently very
oppressive and revolting. The criminal practitioner dwelt in an
atmosphere tainted alike with cruelty and crime, and pulsating
alternately with merciless decrees of death, and the shrieks and wailings
of sentenced guilt. And not always guilt! There exist many records of
proofs, incontestable, but obtained too late, of innocence having been
legally strangled on the gallows in other cases than that of Eliza
Fenning. How could it be otherwise with a criminal code crowded in every
line with penalties of death, nothing but--death? Juster, wiser times
have dawned upon us, in which truer notions prevail of what man owes to
man, even when sitting in judgment on transgressors; and this we owe, let
us not forget, to the exertions of a band of men who, undeterred by the
sneers of the reputedly wise and _practical_ men of the world, and the
tau