nstamped metal; they will not stoop to
accept what the old country sends forth without acknowledgment, as good
enough for _them_. Believe me, this race is prouder than our own, and
it is not by unworthy sneers at them that we shall make them less
vainglorious."

"I scarcely know them, but for the sake of that one man I owe them a
deep affection," said Alfred, warmly.

"I have a scheme for you," said the old man, after a pause; "but we will
talk of it later on. For the present, I want you to aid me in a plan of
my own. Ever since I have been in this country I have endeavored to find
out a person whose name alone was known to me, and with whom I gave a
solemn promise to communicate,--a death-bed promise it was, and given
under no common circumstances. The facts were these:--

"I was once upon a time, when practising as a physician at Jersey, sent
for to attend a patient taken suddenly and dangerously ill. The case was
a most embarrassing one. There were symptoms so incongruous as to reject
the notion of any ordinary disease, and such as might well suggest the
suspicion of poisoning, and yet so skilfully and even patiently had the
scheme been matured, the detection of the poison during life was very
difficult My eagerness in the inquiry was mistaken by the patient for a
feeling of personal kindness towards himself,--an error very familiar
to all medical men in practice. He saw in my unremitting attention and
hourly watching by his bedside the devotion of one like an old friend,
and not the scientific ardor of a student.

"It is just possible that his gratitude was the greater, that the man
was one little likely to conciliate good feeling or draw any sympathy
towards him. He was a hard, cold, selfish fellow, whose life had been
passed amongst the worst classes of play-men, and who rejected utterly
all thought of truth or confidence in his old associates. I mention
this to show how, in a very few days, the accident of my situation
established between us a freedom and a frankness that savored of long
acquaintance.

"In his conversations with me he confessed that his wife had been
divorced from a former husband, and, from circumstances known to him,
he believed she desired his death. He told me of the men to whom in
particular his suspicions attached, and the reasons of the suspicions;
that these men would be irretrievably ruined if his speculations on the
turf were to succeed, and that there was not one of them would not