doubt of a very valuable nature, but in which a considerable loss, in a
pecuniary point of view, must be necessarily expected.

I own that as soon as I had mastered the above agreeable facts, and
ascertained from Mr. Squills that my father really did seem to have
rendered himself legally liable to these demands, I leaned back in my
chair stunned and bewildered.

"So you see," said my father, "that as yet we are contending with
monsters in the dark,--in the dark all monsters look larger and uglier.
Even Augustus Caesar, though certainly he had never scrupled to make as
many ghosts as suited his convenience, did not like the chance of a visit
from them, and never sat alone in tenebris. What the amount of the sums
claimed from me may be, we know not; what may be gained from the other
shareholders is equally obscure and undefined. But the first thing to do
is to get poor Jack out of prison."

"Uncle Jack out of prison!" exclaimed I. "Surely, sir, that is carrying
forgiveness too far."

"Why, he would not have been in prison if I had not been so blindly
forgetful of his weakness, poor man! I ought to have known better. But
my vanity misled me; I must needs publish a great book, as if [said Mr.
Caxton, looking round the shelves] there were not great books enough in
the world! I must needs, too, think of advancing and circulating
knowledge in the form of a journal,--I, who had not knowledge enough of
the character of my own brother-in-law to keep myself from ruin! Come
what--will, I should think myself the meanest of men to let that poor
creature, whom I ought to have considered as a monomaniac, rot in prison
because I, Austin Caxton, wanted common-sense. And [concluded my father,