accepted; and they returned to the obscurity from which they had by
accident emerged.

About six months afterwards, I had the pleasure of drawing up the
marriage settlement between Clara Brandon and Herbert Burford; and a
twelvemonth after, that of standing sponsor to one of the lustiest brats
ever sprinkled at a font: none of which delightful results, if we are to
believe Mr. Ferret, would have ever been arrived at had not he, at a very
critical moment, refused to take counsel's opinion upon the virtues,
capabilities, and powers contained in the great writ of _habeas corpus
ad subjiciendum_.




ESTHER MASON.


About forty years ago, Jabez Woodford, a foreman of shipwrights in the
Plymouth dockyard, whilst carelessly crossing one of the transverse beams
of a seventy-four gun-ship, building in that arsenal, missed his footing,
fell to the bottom of the hold of the huge vessel, and was killed on the
spot. He left a widow and one child--a boy seven years of age, of placid,
endearing disposition, but weak intellect--almost in a state of
destitution. He had been a coarse-tempered, improvident man; and like too
many of his class, in those days at least, dissipated the whole of his
large earnings in present sensuous indulgence, utterly careless or
unmindful of the future. Esther Woodford, who, at the time of her
husband's death, scarcely numbered five-and-twenty years, was still a
remarkably comely, as well as interesting, gentle-mannered person; and