The Ten of Diamonds.

AT length I reached the Moated Grange, on a visit to my friend Græme. But since I am to speak a good deal of this place, I may as well explain that it was misnamed. There was no

moat, nor had there been for a hundred years; but round the old pile, hoary and shrivelled, there was a visible trace of the old ditch, in a hollow covered with greensward going all round the house, which hollow was the only space clear of trees. And these trees! They stood for a mile round, like an army of giants, seventy feet high, all intent, it would seem, upon choking the poor old pile, throwing their big arms over the hollow, swinging them to and fro, and dashing their points against the panes as the wind listed. It would come, by and by, to be a hard task for the stone and lime victim to hold its place, with its sinews of run mortar, against these tyrants of the wood. And then they were as full of noises as Babel itself-noises a thousand times more heterogeneous croaking, chirping, screeching, cawing, whistling, billing, cooing, cuckooing. "What a place to live in," I thought, fresh as I was from town, "where, if there are noises, one

knows something of their meaning-maledictory, yea, devilish as it often is, expressive of the passions of men which will never sleep! But these! what could one make of such a tintamarre! Nothing but the reflection-that is, if you happen to be a philosopher, which I am not-that not one note of all this rural oratorio is without its intention, and thus we always satisfy ourselves; but when we run the matter up a little further, we find it a very small affair-two responses, one to each of two chords vibrating for ever and ever throughout all nature-pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure, turn by turn-the last pain being death!"

"How can you live here, Græme?" I said, as we stood under the old porch, looking out, or rather having our look blocked up by the thickness, and our ears deaved by the eternal screeching and cawing of five thousand crows overhead.

"There's gloom everywhere where man is," he replied," and screeching owls in every brain. You can't get quit." Then lowering his voice, "I am haunted! and yet live here in this Moated Grange. The difference is this: in the town the gaslight and eternal clatter distract a man like me who is plagued from within; here I find some concord between the inside and the out, only the owls in the inside are more grotesque and horrible."

"Well, Græme," said I, "it is needless to disguise what brought me here. The secret is out. The choke-damp has got wind. If the idiot had not blown his brains out, it would have been nothing. You could have paid him back, and he might now have had both his money and his brains."

Got wind!" cried he, clutching me by the

breast of the coat with the fury of a highwayman or a spasmodic actor. "Did the villain Ruggieri tell you?"

"No."

"So far well," he added, taking a long pull with his lungs, as if he had got quit of an attack of asthma; " but though I may satisfy the widow, how am I to appease Heaven? Come," he added, again seizing me with a force in which there was a tremble, "I want to ease my mind. You are my oldest friend, and a load divided is more easily carried."

And leading the way into the parlour, where the fire had got into a fine red heat, and was sending a glare through the ruby and golden contents of several strangely-shaped bottles on the table, he threw himself on a chair on the one side, I taking one on the other. A few minutes of silence intervened.

"If it be as painful for you," he continued, "to hear a confession, as it is for me to make it, you may help yourself to bear the infliction by pouring into your stomach some of that Burgundy. I will take none. I have fire enough in my brain already." And he pushed the bottle to me.

"You were a bit of a blackleg yourself," he continued, as he threw himself back in the arm-chair, and compressed his chest with his folded arms till the blood seemed to mount to his face. "You

were present at that game where I took the five thousand by a trick from Gourlay. You know, as a gambler yourself, that all the tribe are by constitution cheats. It is folly to speak of an honest gambler. The passion is a ten thousand times. distilled selfishness, with no qualm of obligation to God or religion to keep it in check-only

little fear of that bugbear, society. Our club at the 'Red Lion' all knew this in our souls; but every one of us knew also, that the moment he would be discovered cheating, he would be scorched with our hatred and contempt. He must leave our pure society on the instant-not, of course, that he was any worse than the rest of us, but only that he was unfortunate in being discovered. That night Gourlay and I were demons. We had baffled each other, and drank till our brains seethed, though our countenances and speech betrayed nothing but the extreme of coolness. He had won a thousand off me, and hounded me from post to pillar, offering to be cleared out by my skill, as he called it, sneeringly. The fellow, in short, hated me, because the year before, at BadenBaden, I had taken two thousand out of him, and would not give him his revenge."

He must have thought you honest," said I; "otherwise he would not have thus badgered you to play."

No; he had not the generosity to think me honest. I repeat, no gambler ever thinks another gambler honest, and he lies when he says so. He knew himself to be a rogue, and thought it diamond in the teeth of diamond." And pausing and meditating, he repeated the word, "Diamond -diamond-diamond."

I looked at him in surprise. He continued to keep up the cuckoo sound, trying to laugh, and yet totally unable to accomplish even a cackle.

You will know presently why that word produces these strange effects upon me," he at length contrived to be able to say. 'Nor less the form of the figure as painted in these hell-books. It is blazoned everywhere. The devil wears it in fiery