questions involved in the Colonel's birthday-
gift to my cousin Rachel. Follow me carefully,
Betteredge; and count me off on your fingers, if
it will help you," says Mr. Franklin, with a
certain pleasure in showing how clear-headed
he could be, which reminded me wonderfully
of old times when he was a boy. " Question
the first: Was the Colonel's Diamond the object
of a conspiracy in India? Question the second:
Has the conspiracy followed the Colonel's
Diamond to England? Question the third: Did
the Colonel know the conspiracy followed the
Diamond; and has he purposely left a legacy
of trouble and danger to his sister, through the
innocent medium of his sister's child? That is
what I am driving at, Betteredge. Don't let
me frighten you."

It was all very well to say that, but he had
frightened me.

If he was right, here was our quiet English
house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian
diamond—bringing after it a conspiracy of living
rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a
dead man. There was our situation, as revealed
to me in Mr. Franklin's last words! Who ever
heard the like of it— in the nineteenth century,
mind, in an age of progress, and in a country
which rejoices in the blessings of the British
constitution? Nobody ever heard the like of
it, and, consequently, nobody can be expected
to believe it. I shall go on with my story,
however, in spite of that.

When you get a sudden alarm, of the sort
that I had got now, nine times out of ten the
place you feel it in is your stomach. When you
feel it in your stomach, your attention wanders,
and you begin to fidget. I fidgeted silently in
my place on the sand. Mr. Franklin noticed
me, contending with a perturbed stomach, or
mind— which you please; they mean the same
thing and, checking himself just as he was
starting with his part of the story, said to me
sharply, " What do you want?"

What did I want? I didn't tell him; but
I'll tell you, in confidence. I wanted a whiff of
my pipe, and a turn at Robinson Crusoe.

BOY MONSTERS.

WAS it not Yorick who first told us of the
famous Vincent Quirino, who, in the eighth year
of his age, posted up in the public schools at
Rome no less than four thousand five hundred
and sixty different theses upon the most abstruse
points of the most abstruse theology, which he
defended and maintained in such sort as to cramp
and dumbfound his opponents? When Mr.
Shandy talked of the prodigies of childhood who
were masters of fourteen languages at ten, and
so forth, and when Yorick said, "You forget
the great Lipsius, who composed a work the
day he was born"— who but Uncle Toby could
have been so judiciously rude as to remark on
that last work, "They should have wiped it up,
and said no more about it"? But before Mr.
Shandy and Yorick were thus erudite upon
erudition in pinafores, they had been reading,
as I, sad Ignoramus, have been reading since, a
terrible book by the Sieur Adrien Baillet,
librarian to Monsieur the Advocate-General
Lamoignon. It is a French account of Children
become Famous by their Studies or their
Writings, published in the year of our English
Revolution; and a pretty revolution of its own
this work, whether composed in the first or last
year of its author's life, will make in the head
of any one who, like myself, is rather sensitive
than sensible. Talk of ghosts! why, the stories
in this book have nearly frightened a
schoolmaster to death in broad daylight! I lent it
him, and might almost as well have put
ratsbane into his supper. He read it overnight,
and shook in his shoes when he sat at his desk
next morning. A pedagogue frowned at him
in every little boy upon his form. Where there
had been in school one master to fifty boys,
here there were fifty masters to one mannikin.
My friend Jerkins, the father of a little family,
has been rash enough to read this book, though
I advised him not to do so, after seeing the
calamities it brought on other of my friends.
Jerkins, who snapped his fingers at advice, now
buries his head in his newspaper at breakfast-
time, and dares not comment as usual upon
Italian and Irish news, lest the very baby
should cry down to him out of the nursery that
he is a blockhead who does not know Verona
from Pomona, and is all abroad as to the
geography of Ballybog.

Justus Lipsius, for example. What person
above forty could have looked at such a child
without winking and blinking? His friends,
Philology and Philosophy, visible in the shape of
two white children, visited his mother a few
hours before he was born. His benighted
parents sent him to three schools, and in each
one he was taught out of a different grammar.
But from all the three grammars he got nothing
that he did not know before. I have learnt to
look with awe upon Great Babies. Alexander the
Great was, it is said, Great as a Baby. He was
taught by Aristotle to sit thinking in his nurse's
arms, and used to lie awake of nights, troubled
with the philosophy. He received Persian
Ambassadors in place of his Papa as soon as he
could speak. There are people who doubt this,
and there are people who doubt everything,
even ghosts-- prodigies themselves of doubt
upon all things that are prodigious. Will they
allow that Tiberius, at the age of nine, delivered
a funeral Oration over his deceased Father, and
that Augustus, at the age of twelve, delivered
a like Oration over his deceased Grandmother;
and that Cicero, at the age of thirteen, wrote a
treatise on the Art of Talking? Children's
tongues will wag, and only a child can know,
or be expected to tell us, how it is that they
can keep them wagging as they do. For which
reason I feel much beholden to Master Cicero,
though, being an Ignoramus, I do wish he had
not had, even in early years, that hankering
for Latin which prevented him from writing
in plain English, as a Christian ought. There