cares of the world _strepitumque Romae_,--[" And the roar of Rome."]--
to the sweet shades of Pentonville or the remoter plains of Clapham--
conducts some delighted visitor over the intricacies of that Daedalian
masterpiece which he is pleased to call his labyrinth or maze,--now
smiling furtively at his guest's perplexity, now listening with calm
superiority to his futile and erring conjectures, now maliciously
accompanying him through a flattering path in which the baffled
adventurer is suddenly checked by the blank features of a
thoroughfareless hedge, now trembling as he sees the guest stumbling
unawares into the right track, and now relieved as he beholds him after
a pause of deliberation wind into the wrong,--even so, O pleasant reader!
doth the sage novelist conduct thee through the labyrinth of his tale,
amusing himself with thy self-deceits, and spinning forth, in prolix
pleasure, the quiet yarn of his entertainment from the involutions which
occasion thy fretting eagerness and perplexity. But as when, thanks to
the host's good-nature or fatigue, the mystery is once unravelled, and
the guest permitted to penetrate even into the concealed end of the leafy
maze, the honest cit, satisfied with the pleasant pains he has already
bestowed upon his visitor, puts him not to the labour of retracing the
steps he hath so erratically trod, but leads him in three strides, and
through a simpler path, at once to the mouth of the maze, and dismisseth
him elsewhere for entertainment; even so will the prudent narrator, when
the intricacies of his plot are once unfolded, occasion no stale and
profitless delays to his wearied reader, but conduct him, with as much
brevity as convenient, without the labyrinth which has ceased to retain
the interest of a secret.

We shall therefore, in pursuance of the tit's policy, relate as rapidly
as possible that part of our narrative which yet remains untold. On
Brandon's person was found the paper which had contained so fatal an