towards Clifford, he said in a melancholy tone,--

"All your pretty ones?
Did you say all?"

A look from Clifford answered the interesting interrogatory. "These,
then," said Tomlinson, collecting "in his hand the common wealth,--
"these, then, are all our remaining treasures!" As he spoke, he jingled
the coins mournfully in his palm, and gazing upon them with a parental
air, exclaimed,--

"Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play!"

"Oh, d---it!" said Ned, "no sentiment! Let us come to business at once.
To tell you the truth, I, for one, am tired of this heiress-hunting, and
a man may spend a fortune in the chase before he can win one."

"You despair then, positively, of the widow you have courted so long?"
asked Tomlinson.

"Utterly," rejoined Ned, whose addresses had been limited solely to the
dames of the middling class, and who had imagined himself at one time, as
he punningly expressed it, sure of a dear rib from Cheapside,--"utterly;
she was very civil to me at first, but when I proposed, asked me, with a
blush, for my 'references.' 'References?' said I; 'why, I want the place
of your husband, my charmer, not your footman!' The dame was inexorable,
said she could not take me without a character, but hinted that I might
be the lover instead of the bridegroom; and when I scorned the
suggestion, and pressed for the parson, she told me point-blank, with her
unlucky city pronunciation, 'that she would never accompany me to the