CHAPTER III.

Mr. H. Your name is Pry, I think?

Pry. Yes, Sir; Jeremiah Pry, at your service.

Mr. H. An apt name: you have a prying temper. I mean some little curiosity; a sort of inquisitiveness about you.

Pry. A natural thirst after knowledge, you may call it, Sir. CHARLES LAMB.

PENGUIN, though not personally so locomotive as his bustling landlord, was of a disposition infinitely more prying and busy; his mind was no more able to stand still than was the body of Mr. Timothy Wicks; doing nothing was the hardest drudgery that could be imposed upon him; it was the great object of his present life to escape from it, and if he could keep himself in a perpetual though vain and useless pucker, like a squirrel in its rotatory cage, he was willing to compound with his

faculties, and sacrifice their progress to their activity. No sooner did he find himself alone, than he proceeded to decypher, for the fiftieth time at least, the fulsome scrawlings upon the parlour window, perfectly well disposed to "accept a miracle instead of wit," could he have made any such discovery; but as he observed nothing but the autographs and amatory effusions with which he was already familiar, he returned to his chair, and betook himself to sundry conjectures touching the intelligence he had received. Slight as was the foundation for such a surmise, he felt convinced that the motive of the stranger's visit to Thaxted was some important secret, and as his mind made as dead and sure a point at any mystery, as does the staunch spaniel at a concealed hare, he determined instantly to ferret it out if possible. The notion of his being attached to Emily Welbeck he treated as an idle emanation of the brainless head of Tony, for he knew her to be modest and reserved, almost to a morbid bashfulness, while he believed her to have no acquaintance beyond the immediate neighbourhood in which she lived. A remembrance, per

haps, of his own former practices, induced him to consider the landlord's suggestion as infinitely more plausible; but he felt, or at least discovered, no sympathy whatever with his presumed brother contrabandist, since, in order to avert the imputation which he knew to be attached to his own character, he now affected an ostentatious abhorrence of all similar misdemeanours, and talked loudly and angrily against the smugglers with whom the neighbourhood was infested, though he never interfered actively to prevent any of their proceedings. While he was deliberating how he might best pump the stranger, the individual in question entered the parlour, when Penguin, who believed that the old adage of their being truth in wine, extended to edibles and potables of every description, saluted him with a cordial familiarity, and pressed him so hospitably to assist in finishing the remaining syllabubs, that Henry, who was of a singularly friendly and accostible disposition, instantly acquiesced."Mr. Melcomb, I believe," said Penguin, plying his spoon with renovated pleasure at the

thought that he had thus pinned down the subject of his experiment.

"That is my name," said Henry, somewhat surprised; "but I have not the honour of your acquaintance."

66

Belong to the family of that name at Blackwater, in the north, of the county, I suppose ?"

"I was not aware that any family of that name existed in Hampshire."

66 Then you are doubtless one of the Melcombs, or Malcombs, of Cricklade, in Wiltshire ?"

66

They are equally unknown to me."

"There was an old Joel Melcomb,-warm Joe, we used to call him, for he was a rich old hunks-died at Southampton a few years ago."

"I never heard of him; and to save you farther trouble, I may as well inform you at once, as I used to declare to the good citizens of America, when they perpetually cross-questioned me, I neither know the birthplace nor the names of my parents."

66

Humph!" said Penguin, concluding this was merely advanced to stop farther interrogatories, and feeling his curiosity rather stimu

lated than repressed by such a suspicious declaration. "You seemed to admit that your name was Melcomb, talked of being in America; you are then an American, I suppose ?"

"I believe myself to have been born in England, though in what part I cannot tell you, for I am myself ignorant of the fact ?"

"Rather a marvellous tale," said Penguin, with an incredulous look, and an emphasis upon the first word which seemed to betray a conviction that it was altogether a fabrication. "Few people would like to make such a humiliating confession, especially to a stranger whom they had never seen before."

"What other people may or may not like is no rule to me. I like truth, I hate unnecessary mystery, and I see nothing humiliating in what I have avowed. In being the acknowledged son of the highest nobleman, I should not feel myself exalted; nor should I hold myself degraded, were it proved that I was the offspring of a beggar."

"All right, all very right; quite agree with you, particularly in what you say about un