, and I never saw any of
the family again."

"And what did you do, Doctor?"

"I went to London, to seek my fortune as best I might; and I hope you
may all prosper as well, my young friends."

"And is it all really true?" asked Amy, who had listened with breathless
attention.

"That is the worst of it; it really is," said the Doctor.

THE SECRET OF THE TWO PLASTER CASTS.

Years before the accession of her Majesty Queen Victoria, and yet at not
so remote a date as to be utterly beyond the period to which the
reminiscences of our middle-aged readers extend, it happened that two
English gentlemen sat at table on a summer's evening, after dinner,
quietly sipping their wine and engaged in desultory conversation. They
were both men known to fame. One of them was a sculptor whose statues
adorned the palaces of princes, and whose chiselled busts were the pride
of half the nobility of his nation; the other was no less renowned as an
anatomist and surgeon. The age of the anatomist might have been guessed
at fifty, but the guess would have erred on the side of youth by at
least ten years. That of the sculptor could scarcely be more than
five-and-thirty. A bust of the anatomist, so admirably executed as to
present, although in stone, the perfect similitude of life and flesh,
stood upon a pedestal opposite to the table at which sat the pair, and
at once explained at least one connecting-link of companionship between
them. The anatomist was exhibiting for the criticism of his friend a
rare gem which he had just drawn from his cabinet: it was a crucifix
magnificently carved in ivory, and incased in a setting of pure gold.

"The carving, my dear sir," observed Mr. Fiddyes, the sculptor, "is
indeed, as you say, exquisite. The muscles are admirably made out, the
flesh well modelled, wonderfully so for the size and material; and
yet--by the bye, on this point you must know more than I--the more I
think upon the matter, the more I regard the artistic conception as
utterly false and wrong."

"You speak in a riddle," replied Dr. Carnell; "but pray go on, and
explain."

"It is a fancy I first had in my student-days," replied Fiddyes.
"Conventionality, not to say a most proper and becoming reverence,
prevents people by no means ignorant from considering the point. But
once think upon it, and you at least, of all men, must at once perceive
how utterly impossible it would be for a victim nailed upon a cross by
hands and feet t