world. It owes in part its existence to your aid. We have passed, I will venture to say, speaking for us both, many delightful hours together in weaving its fanciful and, perhaps, fantastic web; often merry, but sometimes indulging that artificial sadness, not always unaccompanied by tears, which we strangely enough reckon among the pleasures of life. Should the public decide that our enjoyment was not based on delusion, I shall be happy. Sir Cosmo will not have reasoned, or Pierre laughed, or Alexis sentimentalized, or Denzil and Isabella loved in vain. We will untie a second ream of paper, and recommence in high spirits the task of building up another little world of fiction. If not-but I will not be guilty of uttering what might prove an evil omen At all events I shall ever

remain,

Your affectionate father,

St. John's Wood.

Sept. 1843.

JAMES AUGUSTUS ST. JOHN.

SIR COSMO DIGBY.

CHAPTER I.

TREASURE-TROVE.

In western climes there is a town,

To those who dwell therein well-known.

BUT although the dwellers therein happen to stand in this predicament, it may perhaps be as well to enter, for the reader's sake, into some little explanation, especially as several of the strange events recorded in this history seem to have taken their rise from the peculiar features and accidents of the neighbourhood. This cluster of homesteads is commonly denominated Abertâf. Commercially speaking, the place is of no importance. For notwithstanding its charming situation and fine river, the inhabitants make light of the blessings of civilisation, and contrive to remain, in most things, a couple of centuries at least behind their age.

VOL. I.

B

But if Abertâf contain little to interest the merchant or the political economist, it abounds with attractions of no mean order for admirers of the picturesque. Situated near the mouth of a large river, it is yet defended from the sea breezes by a chain of lofty barren heights, which, furnishing through a narrow cleft an issue to the waters of the Tâf, continue to stretch along the coast like a vast rampart. Through this gap, which affords the inhabitants a glimpse of the ocean, the tide enters to fill, not the sandy channel of the Tâf only, but likewise that large semi-circular basin which extends from the roots of Sir John's Hill to the range of precipices along which runs the sea, front of the town. The ruins of its huge castle, perched upon piles of rocks, at whose cavernous base the waves foam and thunder at high water, constitute a sort of Acropolis under the shelter and protection of which the place appears to have grown up. What noble family inhabited in past ages its spacious halls and lofty towers, it boots not now to inquire. Their only successor is the owl, which, nestled in the thick drapery of ivy that wraps round the old turrets and bastions, and seems to keep them warm in hard weather, hoots and screams at night over the subjacent buildings, filling the ear of the belated school-boy or peasant with dread. From this point a few straggling streets branch off, some

descending from the castle moat towards the bottom of a valley enlivened by a rattling stream, while others occupy the slope of a low range of hills stretching inland till it plunges into the roots of the mountains. Near this latter point, at a considerable distance from the habitations, stands the church, surrounded by a grove of ancient and gigantic yew trees. Between these two edifices, the church and the castle, flows the tiny stream of business which constitutes the vitality of Abertâf.

Extending eastward from the town, along the summit of the cliffs, runs a beautiful bye-road, affording at intervals views of the river and the ocean through breaks in the briery fence, or between the trunks of the trees, which flourish luxuriantly along the very brink of the precipice, and intermingling their boughs with others on the opposite side of the road, convert it into a kind of leafy arcade. This being at once cool and breezy in summer, and in winter sheltered, has been chosen for the public walk, where lovers stroll by moonlight, and where, when a gleam of sunshine breaks forth, in autumn or spring, you may behold the elders of the place, the very three-legged figures with which Edipos non-plussed the philosophy of the Sphinx, parading up and down, discussing the crops, or the weather, or the theory of ghosts and apparitions, a topic most popular in that part of