his scheme long before hand, and that as he took care wherever and whenever he stopped to let every one know that he, Narcissus, was John Brown, he had no doubt that as John Brown he should be held responsible for every thing that had been done. He passed a wretched morning he knew not what to do. As to seeking his friend, that was out of the question, as he had no clue to the place of his destination. At last he resolved to go home at once, so he had an early dinner and when the light Oxford drove up and deposited the greater portion of its freight and passengers at the Gloucester coffee-house, he got inside and rode into the city. He arrived too late to see his father, for Mr. Nicholas left the bank immediately business was over. He took his luggage therefore and a porter to the corner of Moorfields, and booked himself in the Highgate stage. When he arrived at Belle-vue cottage it was quite dark. No lights were burning either in the parlour or dining-room, but he could see that there was a candle in his parents' bed-room, and that several persons were passing and repassing between it and the window. He rang the bell, and the maid ran to let him in. When she saw who the applicant for admission was, she gave a sort of half scream, half chuckle, and said "she was so glad he was come, for missus was gone to bed with the asterisks, and she would run and tell master."

As soon as Narcissus reached the parlour his father came in, and shaking him by the hand assured him he was glad to see him-" but where is she, my boy-where is she?" enquired Nicholas.

"She!-who?" said Narcissus.

"She!-who?-why your sister, Julia," said the father, putting on his spectacles.

Narcissus turned sick and pale, and sat down in a chair, "What do you mean?" said he at length.

"Mean-why-eh? Did not your sister Julia accompany you from Woodstock last night-eh?"

Narcissus could not reply. He trembled. The perspiration flowed from every pore of his body, and he would have sunk to the ground had not he held firmly to his chair Before his father could question him any further, his mother, en deshabille, attended by the apothecary to the Dorcas and Tract-distributing Society, entered the room, and flinging herself into his arms, amidst tears and sobs, called him by all the tender names she could invent, and asked him what he had done. with the vile hussy who had offended and left the excellent and worthy lady who had been more than a mother to her.

Narcissus, as soon as he could speak, assured her he had not seen his sister for years, and did not know where she was, or what she was doing.

"Heavens! what a base girl," said Mrs. Smoothly, turning up her eye tabernacle-ly, "there, read that."

The that was a letter bearing the postmark of Woodstock. Its contents were these:

"Madam,

"Your daughter ran away yesterday evening. She has long been dissatisfied with me because she pretended I was severe and harsh to her, and not so kind as the lady from whom I took her. She has, I find, frequently met a young man in the park. He was with her

this morning, and went off with him this evening in a post-chaise. I find by inquiring at the Bear inn that although he went by the name of John Brown, the gentleman was her brother, Mr. Narcissus Smoothly, so no doubt he has enticed her to run away home. One of the Oxford boys knew him, and told the ostler who he was. As the post is just going out I can say no more than to express a hope that Miss Julia Finish will find a better friend in her brother than,

Narcissus read the letter through, was convinced he had been the innocent cause of the ruin of his own sister, and fell down in a fit. When he recovered he found himself in bed, with his father sitting by his side. To him he revealed all that had taken place, but begged him to conceal it from his mother.

Nicholas was greatly shocked. He was as ignorant as his son of Julia's having left her former situation and transferred to a lady near Woodstock. Mrs. Smoothly had purposely concealed it from him, not wishing that her son, of whom she was very proud, should be known as the brother of a governess, and a girl to whom, for reasons she herself could not assign, she entertained an unnatural aversion.

As soon as daylight appeared, Nicholas hastened to London, and, for the first time in his life, rode on the coach. He went to a policeofficer, one of the old robin-red-breasts, who were capable of detecting more thieves and tracing out more mysteries in one day than a modern blue-bottle can do in a month. He told him every particular that he could gather from Narcissus, and begged him to use his best endeavours to discover the young lady.

At the Gloucester coffee-house the police-officer found the waterman, from him he learned the number of the coach which had been called to convey a gentleman and lady from the inn, and the driver's name. He soon discovered him and told him the nature of his business, and ordered him to drive him to the house where he had deposited his fare. He was not surprised at being set down at the door of a notorious house in square. A short conversation with the owner produced Miss Julia Finish, who had only that morning discovered and resolutely resisted the vile designs of Mr. Duplex Doubleface, who, finding that his attempts were vain, and his character seen through, had wisely absconded.

Julia was restored to her home. The story, however, got buzzed about that she and the clever Narcissus had done something naughty. The Dorcas Society visited their faults upon sister Smoothly, and turned her out of their set.

Belle-vue house was shortly afterwards vacated, and Mr. Nicholas Smoothly, widower, settled down with his son and his daughter-in-law in a snug cottage near the river Lea. Narcissus left Oxford, where he was ashamed to show his face, and became a steady and painstaking Iclerk in the bank under his father. Mr. Duplex Doubleface received a severe note from Dr. Meanwell, to whom Nicholas revealed his baseness, and a hint that his name was struck off the books of Teakettle Hall. He went into the army, and often entertained his friends at the mess-table with the way in which, as a gay Oxonian, he had done Mr. John Brown, brown.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE INCOME TAX.

"Venienti occurrite morbo."

"A quelque chose malheur est bon."
"Quærenda pecunia primum."

Its

SWEET, says the poet, are the uses of adversity,—a doctrine too sublime for any mere prosing matter of fact man to have hit upon. very sound is enough to scatter the wits (if they have any) of the whole tribe of Cocker.

"Adversity, indeed!" exclaims some testy devotee of the multiplication table, as he exploringly thrusts his dexter hand to the very bottom of the marsupial reduplication of his haut de chausses (the phrase is untranslatable into prudish English), and then buttons it tight, by way of policy of assurance on the contents, as if he felt himself surrounded by the swell mob: "Yes, you may well call the income-tax adversity; but what there is in it so exceedingly sweet to extract, (seeing that it leaves the duties on sugar untouched), plague take me if I can conceive."

Adversity!" re-echoes another more placid and religious disciple of quietism, "the adversities which come from above carry with them their merciful purposes: but the income tax (Heaven pardon me for saying so) must have come to us from an opposite direction, for it is a just punishment on us for our (that is, for other people's) manifold offences." "Nay," cries a third interlocutor, with a knowing wink (he held office under the late administration), "the sweet you wot of is the shake this inquisitorial tax will give to Peel and his administration. Yes, it must throw him over, and that is the sweet use of the incometax."

"May be so," rejoins an occasional contributor of sonnets and stanzas ; "but I should rather think reference is made to the exemption of incomes under an annual hundred and fifty; and yet, on second thoughts, that's but cold comfort, after all. For my own part, I'd rather have a thousand sevenpences to pay-viz., upon good and sufficient cause."

Right, gentlemen, right, every one of you; there is partial truth in "most exquisite all you offer; but yet you have not hit upon our reason." The income tax is indeed a bitter pill,-worse than coloquindita, and coming as it does in time of peace, it brings not with it its customary provision for younger children, in the gunpowder thinning of an excessive population. Still it has a sweet (an aigre doux if you will) of more general import than any thing you have hinted at; and it lies (as you will at once acknowledge when it is pointed out to you) in an invigorating reaction which it will awaken in men's minds,-in a magnanimous effort it will inspire to have the seven pences forthcoming,-in the stimulus, in short, which it will give to the industry of the country. This advantage of direct taxation is so immense that we cannot sufficiently wonder at its having escaped the ex-officio admirers of that mode of raising revenue, which, like the lame dog, wanted a lift over the stile very badly. Unlike indirect taxation, an income tax suffers no man to skulk out of the pecuniary service of his country through the back door of a temperance society, or by blocking up his maid's bedchamber window, or seiling his wife's palfrey, or putting down the family chariot. No, no, we must book up, we must shell out, the tin

must be forthcoming; and thus the whole ingenuity of the country is called forth to meet the emergency, and (capital remaining as before) to coax out of it as much additional profit as will stop the mouth of the tax-gatherer. Thus it is in mechanics, that by increasing the weight you give momentum to the wheels, and that the watch goes the faster when another turn is put upon the mainspring.

The English, with all their faults, are stout-hearted; and they are. never so full of resources as when they are in a good mess of difficulties. Besides, admitting that some of them may be so mean-spirited as to desire to sit down and save the amount, instead of labouring, lying, and cheating, as an honest man should do, to make good the deficiency, the thing is not so easily to be done. Half the world possess not as much as suffices to supply their indispensable wants, and with the other half, le superflu, chose si nécessaire, has become by habit as imperative in its demands, as "meat, drink, lodging, and washing" themselves. Much less can it be expected that the money can be extorted out of a miserly economy in the article of vices, or in that of those minor sins, which pass muster under the name of innocent amusements.

Is it reasonable to expect that the shopkeeper should forego his halfprice to the theatre ?-that the clerk in office should retrench on his lobster salad after the play, at the Finish? or that the family tradesman: should surrender his hebdomadal glass-coach and dinner at Hamptoncourt? Is the man of wit and pleasure about town to desert Crockford's, to cut Melton, or to part with his unavowed establishment a little way out of town?-are the court of aldermen to forswear turtle, parliament men to give up whitebait, or, worse still, to defraud their free and independent constituents of their customary head-money? "Forbid it heaven and forbid it love;" the thing is not to be thought of. Still, the seven pences must be had, somehow or other; and there is nothing for it but to be up betimes, and earn the amount.

Considering, therefore, how near we are to the month of October, it is high time that we set seriously to work, to excogitate some new method of utilizing our respective capacities. In all cases of pecuniary difficulty, a little bit of land is a great resource; and it may be thought that the man who possesses that, will have nothing to do but raise his rents three per cent. or put it into the lease that the tenant shall pay the landlord's tax. If this be generally adopted, the price of wheat we shall be told must mount, and dear bread will make high wages; thus the tax would, as far as the land goes, be paid, and nobody the worse for it.

This is capital hustings' logic, and it is a thousand pities that it should be good no where else. But, alas, if we raise wages, down come profits like an avalanche; and with a fall in protits comes a fall in employment. Thus it is, ever, that the weakest go to the wall. Well, when the people can't work, why they can't eat. Farmer's stock therefore will fetch less, and then the rogue of a tenant is so unreasonable, he will ask a reduction of rent, or perhaps} will stop payment altogether. So, that game won't play. Some will "try it on" perhaps, and for three years may succeed, but it won't do on the long run; and as for a repeal of the tax, all that can be said is, we wish you may get it."

Reverting then to the money-making plan, that too is not quite so easily done as said. Applied to the whole nation, it is little better than an argument in a circle. All, however, must make the attempt

though all cannot succeed: for the learned have observed that the more the necessity for money-making is increased (no matter by what cause) the greater will be men's reluctance to part with what they have, and the greater, consequently, must be the ingenuity necessary to work them into so desperate a liberality. Now this to be sure is the weak side of all taxation. Lay it on as you will, and make it as lopsided as you please, a tax is a tax, and, to its whole amount, a national calamity: but all national calamities, as Salvator Rosa says in his satires, fall ultimately on the poor; so that, exemption or no exemption, all classes are hit; and it is the old Joe Miller of the drum-boy over again; there is no pleasing the patient, strike where you will. There is no use thereføre in equivocating; on the fifth of next October every woman's son of us will (in meal or in malt) go to breakfast (if he have one to go to) three per cent. a poorer man than he was the day before-excepting only the chosen few who shall be salaried to engage in the collection. Some indeed will pay the tax twice over; first, by their own direct contribution, and secondly, by the loss of all the custom their employers in their first alarm will withdraw on account of their own taxation; and thereupon every man must work the harder to cover the deficiency.

One mode of contending with the difficulty, which we doubt not will meet with protectors, would be to issue an additional number of banknotes, which, by making money plenty, would leave enough for every one to pay his tax, without intrenching on other pleasures. It would be only restricting once more cash issues, and re-voting a pound-note and a shilling to be worth a guinea.

But then, to hear what a parcel of dry, calculating codgers would advance about money becoming cheap as it grew plenty, about adverse exchanges, and a pro tanto national bankruptcy;-no, that would never do in these times.

Whichever way we turn, we are beat back on the one plan of increasing our industry. Oh! for some new, unthought of, infallible, certain, sure method of raising the supplies-some Mississippi scheme, some South Sea bubble, some Poyais bond imagination to meet the emergency, by which a man might be the salvation of his country, and make a colossal fortune for himself at the same blow. Could we not, for instance, open bear account in China debentures. We don't mean a speculation in teapots and soup-tureens, but to offer Europe a bargain of half a dozen Chinese provinces to be wrested in the fulness of time from the celestial empire; or could we not mortgage to the Rothschildren the dollars which he of the yellow screen must one day or other fork out by way of ransom for his metropolis. Could we not raise a comfortable loan, on a hypothéqued tax upon John Chinaman's pigtails, to be levied as soon as we shall become absolute masters of the heads that carry them? Would it be an infringement of our navigation laws to sell to Europe a right of submarine railways, to be worked on the new patent for generating oxygen in close vessels? or might we venture on a transference of the mare clausum doctrine to the atmosphere, and set up turnpikes in the air between England and every where, to intercept the self-moving air-balloons which are to be invented some day next week? Or, lastly, might we not put to auction, for the purposes of revenue, all the seats in parliament; the highest bidder to be the sitting member, who should pay the money into the treasury instead of wasting it in detail, in treating, bribery, intimidation, and lawyers to attend committees? It