For some seconds Harry and his spouse looked at each other as if unable to believe their eyes; but the lady’s good sense at last prevailed, and gulping down something which would have come out with most women, she gently shook her husband’s hand, now liberated from the purse-silk, with ’Harry, love, I am so glad to find you here.  I was really afraid that worse had happened than the failure of Skinner & Co.’

Harry replied in rather an indistinct tone, though Charles Lacy ever after vowed he did wonderfully, considering the looks of Mrs Blackmore and her daughters.  As for Maria she retired from silk and all, without a word about deceivers, which was also remarkable.  Sense in the person of Mrs Bunting for once appeared contagious.  The Blackmores, one and all, tacitly agreed that there had been no mistake whatever in the family, beyond the droll particular of their not recognising in a gentleman introduced to them as Mr Harry Phipps the husband of a lady whom they had been accustomed to address as Mrs Bunting.  By the failure of Skinner & Co. poor Mrs Bunting had lost everything but the cottage and furniture at Westbourne; a fact which she learned only on her arrival in London to pay a long-projected visit to her mother’s relatives, the Blackmores.

The Buntings in due time went home.  We have reason to believe that there was never even a curtain-lecture delivered on the subject of the purse-silk.  When we last visited Westbourne, Mrs Phipps Bunting was as active, as good-natured, and as popular as ever; but people had forgotten to say Master Harry, for Henry Phipps Bunting, Esquire, had been appointed Her Majesty’s stamp-distributer for the district.  He was also invested with a couple of agencies for certain absent proprietors; but he never again ‘thought he might go’ on sporting-excursions; and no family could have imagined him to be a bachelor, for ever since he set fairly to work, a more married-like man we never saw.

THE DROLLERIES OF FALSE POLITICAL ECONOMY.

WINES AND OTHER LIQUORS.

The portion devoted to the subject of intoxicating liquors would make a curious chapter in the history of legislation in almost every European country.  Here there is a double cause of disturbance, since besides notions about the balance of trade and the like, many well-meaning, though not always judicious, attempts have been made to render such legislation conducive to sobriety and morality.  Thus among the Irish statutes one stumbles on an act of Queen Elizabeth’s reign ’Against making of Aqua Vitæ.’  It is justly described as ’a drink nothing profitable to be daily drunken and used,’ ’and thereby much corn, grain, and other things are consumed, spent, and wasted to the great hinderance, loss, and damages of the poor inhabitants of this realm’—­for which reason are passed provisions, not to modify but entirely to suppress it—­with what effect we may easily know.  But our object at present is not with legislation for the suppression of drunkenness, which always deserves favourable consideration, but with the commercial regulations affecting liquors, and the strange notions of political economy involved in them.  The subject is so ample that we are obliged to restrict our illustrations almost entirely to one small country—­Scotland.