Crouched in a corner, white and scared, her hair
fallen loose, her eyes wild and fixed, her pale lips
muttering "Murder, murder!" and "Laurence!"
and the blood dropping heavily on her dress, they
found her. Too late. In three days she died.

Years after, Laurence Grantley was seen, a
bent aged withered man, standing on the crags
above Black Tarn. The man who saw him—old
Deedham's son—spoke to him, but Laurence
did not answer, and was never seen again.
During that same summer, the waters drying
more than usual, a dead man's hand lay
uncovered in the Tarn; and men whispered to
each other that it was the hand of the former
owner of Grantley Hall. No one cared to
verify the suspicion, and the grave of the last of
the Grantleys is still unfilled in the family
mausoleum.

MYNHEER VAN PRIG.

WHATEVER could have brought Mynheer van
Prig and your humble servant in contact? The
world was surely wide enough for Prig and
self. What unkind fortune, what capricious
fate, what wilful wind, could have blown us
together? I could well have done without Van
Prig, and he might properly have done without
me. I wanted nothing with the man: why
couldn't he let me alone? If Van Prig had let
me be, I should never have written this paper,
and he—on my account at least—would never
have been delivered over to the tormentors.
Thus two (possible) evils would have been
prevented. But the Pascal influences were against
us. There was a cohobation of Sol with the
White Dragon in Balneo Mariæ, and the result
of the projection was Van Prig. Clotho, Atropos,
and Lachesis, ruled otherwise. It was fated
that Van Prig and I were to meet, and that we
should both be sufferers from our very short
acquaintance. May the public be the only
parties that will derive any benefit from the disastrous
connexion of the non-undersigned with
Mynheer van Prig.

He who travels much abroad, and is worth
anything as a traveller, will scarcely fail to make
himself, to the best of his ability, acquainted with
the systems of jurisprudence which prevail in the
countries he traverses. Landing in Barataria,
one of our earliest visits should be to the plenary
court, where his Excellency el Gobernador Don
Sancho Panza sits full of wisdom and garlic.
On crossing the Styx, the traveller is compelled
to put in an appearance before Minos, C.J., and
Justices Rhadamanthus and Æachus, in banco.
It is true that a great many modes exist of
performing this duty, and that the manner of studying
the administration of justice in divers countries
is infinitely varied. Young Anacharsis is
sometimes launched into a lawsuit so soon as he
has set foot on Grecian shore; and I have heard
of a ferocious tribe of island blackamoors whose
strict, but simple, code compels them on a European
making his appearance among them to seize
him, try him by a banjo and tambourine head
court-martial, and, on his being convicted of
being white, to skin him alive, cook, and eat
him. Prior to the first great French
Revolution, if a foreigner died on the hospitable soil
of France, the first intimation of the fact that
reached his heirs was accompanied by the
consoling intimation that the Most Christian King
had condescended to exercise the eminently
infamous prerogative known as the Droit d'Aubaine,
and that his exempts had laid violent hands
upon all goods and chattels, moneys and securities,
belonging to the foreigner deceased. Again,
there are some travellers whom an instinct of
cruelty leads to watch and pry into the operation
of the criminal law abroad. They are of the
family of that horrible amateur of agony, George
Selwyn, who, when the wretched Damiens was
to be tortured, scarified, and dismembered, posted
to Paris to witness the concluding bedevilment
of the would-be regicide; and, desiring to be as
near the scaffold as possible, gave his name to
the sentinels who were keeping the crowd back
as "Monsieur de Londres." They, knowing
that the title "Monsieur de Paris" was shared
alike by the archbishop-metropolitan and by the
common executioner, thought, reasoning from
analogy, that the strange gentleman might be
either the Primate of England or else the Sieur
Jean Ketch on his travels, and so admitted him
within the "inner ring," where he could witness,
at his ease, the final atrocities. There are
tourists in our days who experience a keen pleasure
in hanging about the court of some Egyptian
cadi, to see some miserable fellah receive the
bastinado. They pay five-and-twenty francs for
the successor of Sanson to exhibit to them the
dull red timbers and shining grooves of the
guillotine. They go, at Nuremberg, to see the
headsman's sword, with the hollow blade that
holds quicksilver in its cavity, to drive the
momentum from hilt to point; and, in Russia, their
valet de place gives them timely intimation of
some peculiarly invigorating administration of
the stick to refractory servants, or drunken
donkey-drivers, in the yard of the police-office: or
of some gala day, when the condign punishment
of the knout is to be publicly inflicted in the horse-
market at the top of the Newskoi perspective.

The master of the ceremonies who introduced
me to Mynheer van Prig had LAW for his name,
and was the criminal law of the constitutional
kingdom of Belgium.

Nearly four years have passed since then. I
don't exactly know why I had come to Brussels,
save that I entertained a very great disinclination
to return to England just then. All the
spring and summer I had been wandering in the
far north of Europe, and I thought I might as
well wait until the first days of December, ere I
went home. So, Paris having no charms for me
at that period, I elected Brussels as a resting-
place for eight weeks. I didn't know a soul in
the city at first, which was remarkably nice.
I discovered an acquaintance one day in the