a few minutes, and if you like the
rain so much, my very good friend, why, there is plenty of room in the
lane to--(ugh! ugh! ugh!) to enjoy it."

As the speaker ended, the dim light, just faintly glimmering at the
entrance of the friendly shelter, was obscured by his shadow, and
presently afterwards his companion, joining him, said,--

"Well, if it must be so; but how can you be fit to brave all the
perils of our scheme, when you shrink, like a palsied crone, from the
sprinkling of a few water-drops?"

"A few water-drops, my very good friend," answered the other, "a
few--what call you them, ay, water-falls rather; (ugh! ugh!) but let me
tell you, my brother citizen, that a man may not like to get his skin
wet with waters and would yet thrust his arm up to the very elbow in
blood! (ugh! ugh!)"

"The devil!" mentally ejaculated Mr. Brown, who at the word "scheme" had
advanced one step from his retreat, but who now at the last words of the
intruder drew back as gently as a snail into his shell; and although his
person was far too much enveloped in shade to run the least chance of
detection, yet the honest broker began to feel a little tremor vibrate
along the chords of his thrilling frame, and a new anathema against the
fatal umbrella rise to his lips.

"Ah!" quoth the second, "I trust that it may be so; but, to return to
our project, are you quite sure that these two identical ministers are
in the regular habit of walking homeward from that Parliament which
their despotism has so degraded?"

"Sure? ay, that I am; Davidson swears to it!"

"And you are also sure of their persons, so that, even in the dusk, you
can recognize them? for you know I have never seen them."

"Sure as fivepence!" returned the first speaker, to whose mind the lives
of the persons referred to were of considerably less value than the sum
elegantly specified in his metaphorical reply.

"Then," said the other, with a deep, stern determination of tone, "then
shall this hand, by which one of the proudest of our oppressors has
already fallen, be made a still worthier instrument of the wrath of
Heaven!"

"You are a d--d pretty shot, I believe," quoth the first speaker, as
indifferently as if he were praising the address of a Norfolk squire.

"Never did my eye misguide me, or my aim swerve a hair's-breadth from
its target! I thought once, when I learned the art as a boy, that in
battle, rather than in the execution of a single criminal, that sk