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of its being strange affords no proof. When suspicions of any description have been engendered, the slightest occurrences tend to confirm them. I shall now be apt, doubtless, to attribute every circumstance that occurs to this imagined somnambulism, as readily as a non-professional man who, on reading a medical work, conceives that he has the disease described. I must, notwithstanding, be satisfied; and until I am satisfied, I'll not only tie the string to my ancle every night, but I'll lock my room door, and hide the key."

Had Sylvester referred to his purse—out of which he had paid for the brandy-and-water—it might have thrown a little more light upon the subject; but this didn't occur to him: he tried to believe that Obabiah's assertions were utterly false, and on retiring that night, he locked the door, placed the key in his writing desk, locked that, and then put it under the bed.

But this was of no use at all. In less than an hour after he had fallen asleep, he released his ancle, dressed himself, got the key out of the desk, opened the door, and left the house with the utmost deliberation; and yet, in the morning, when he awoke, he found his ancle secured, the key in his desk, and the desk itself in precisely the same place as that in which he had the previous night left it.

And thus he acted, night after night—adjusting the string and hiding the key, which he found and hid again, without having, when awake, even the most remote idea of the fact—but beyond this nothing at all worth recording occurred till the following Tuesday.

On that day, Cotherstone Fair was held, and gaiety was in the ascendant. Legge had, as usual, erected a booth—in a paddock adjoining his house—for dancing; and while the girls of the village, with their pink and blue streamers, were laughing and clapping their hands for joy, and cracking nuts, and promenading, and glancing at their sweethearts, in all the pride of youth and rustic beauty; the men were drinking and joking, and smoking their pipes, and apparently somewhat more happy than princes.

Legge, morever, had procured prolific germs of amusement; and these prolific germs were chemises, shawls, scarfs, and a couple of fine legs of mutton.

The chemises were to be run for—and so were the shawls and scarfs—but the mutton was to be climbed for, by those whose ambition might prompt them to go to the pole.

These delights were, however, reserved till the evening, for Legge knew something of human nature. He had kept that house nearly twenty years! he, therefore, cannot be supposed to have been unconscious of the way in which the house had kept him. No: the prizes were exhibited throughout the day. None could think of leaving until they had been won; and while all beheld them with fond anticipations, they panted for pleasure, and drank more beer.

Anxious to witness the amusements of the people, Sylvester himself walked through the village immediately after he had dined, and as Obadiah, from one of the windows of "The Crumpet" saw him—for the first time since the night of the brandy-and-water—he rushed out of