suppressed confidence, no bridge from board to bed, over which a false
step (and your wine-cup is a marvellous corrupter of ambulatory
rectitude) might precipitate into an irrecoverable abyss of perilous
communication or unwholesome truth. One's pillow became at once the
legitimate and natural bourne to "the overheated brain;" and the
generous rashness of the coenatorial reveller was not damped by
untimeous caution or ignoble calculation.

But "we have changed all that now." Sobriety has become the successor
of suppers; the great ocean of moral encroachment has not left us one
little island of refuge. Miserable supper-lovers that we are, like
the native Indians of America, a scattered and daily disappearing
race, we wander among strange customs, and behold the innovating and
invading Dinner spread gradually over the very space of time in which
the majesty of Supper once reigned undisputed and supreme!

O, ye heavens, be kind,
And feel, thou earth, for this afflicted race.--WORDSWORTH.

As he was sitting down to the table, Clarence's notice was arrested by
a somewhat suspicious and unpleasing occurrence. The supper room was
on the ground floor, and, owing to the heat of the weather, one of the
windows, facing the small garden, was left open. Through this window
Clarence distinctly saw the face of a man look into the room for one
instant, with a prying and curious gaze, and then as instantly
disappear. As no one else seemed to remark this incident, and the
general attention was somewhat noisily engrossed by the subject of
conversation, Clarence thought it not worth while to mention a
circumstance for which the impertinence of any neighbouring servant or
drunken passer-by might easily account. An apprehension, however, of