to the garden and smoke a cigar in that rural quiet spot. The night
was very calm. The moonbeams slept softly upon the herbage of
Gray's Inn gardens, and bathed with silver splendour Theobald's Row.
A million of little frisky twinkling stars attended their queen, who
looked with bland round face upon their gambols, as they peeped in
and out from the azure heavens. Along Gray's Inn wall a lazy row of
cabs stood listlessly, for who would call a cab on such a night?
Meanwhile their drivers, at the alehouse near, smoked the short pipe
or quaffed the foaming beer. Perhaps from Gray's Inn Lane some
broken sounds of Irish revelry might rise. Issuing perhaps from
Raymond Buildings gate, six lawyers' clerks might whoop a tipsy
song--or the loud watchman yell the passing hour; but beyond this
all was silence; and young Perkins, as he sat in the summerhouse at
the bottom of the garden, and contemplated the peaceful heaven, felt
some influences of it entering into his soul, and almost forgetting
revenge, thought but of peace and love.

Presently, he was aware there was someone else pacing the garden.
Who could it be?--Not Blatherwick, for he passed the Sabbath with
his grandmamma at Clapham; not Scully surely, for he always went to
Bethesda Chapel, and to a select prayer-meeting afterwards. Alas!
it WAS Scully; for though that gentleman SAID that he went to
chapel, we have it for a fact that he did not always keep his
promise, and was at this moment employed in rehearsing an extempore
speech, which he proposed to deliver at St. Stephen's.

"Had I, sir," spouted he, with folded arms, slowly pacing to and
fro--"Had I, sir, entertained the smallest possible intention of
addressing the House on the present occasion--hum, on the present
occasion--I would have endeavoured to prepare myself in a way that