that bill, which, to one of his frugality, meant wealth; and he promised

himself to disappear among the crowds at Waterloo, or (if that should

prove impossible) to slink out of the house in the course of the

evening and melt like a dream into the millions of London. By a peculiar

interposition of Providence and railway mismanagement he had not so long

to wait.

He was one of the first to come to himself and scramble to his feet

after the Browndean catastrophe, and he had no sooner remarked his

prostrate nephews than he understood his opportunity and fled. A man of

upwards of seventy, who has just met with a railway accident, and who is

cumbered besides with the full uniform of Sir Faraday Bond, is not

very likely to flee far, but the wood was close at hand and offered the

fugitive at least a temporary covert. Hither, then, the old gentleman

skipped with extraordinary expedition, and, being somewhat winded and

a good deal shaken, here he lay down in a convenient grove and was

presently overwhelmed by slumber. The way of fate is often highly

entertaining to the looker-on, and it is certainly a pleasant

circumstance, that while Morris and John were delving in the sand to

conceal the body of a total stranger, their uncle lay in dreamless sleep

a few hundred yards deeper in the wood.

He was awakened by the jolly note of a bugle from the neighbouring high

road, where a char-a-banc was bowling by with some belated tourists. The

sound cheered his old heart, it directed his steps into the bargain, and

soon he was on the highway, looking east and west from under his vizor,

The Wrong Box