a refined taste.  The floor of the room was covered by a magnificent tapestry carpet.  The chairs, lounges and tables, were of the most costly and elegant description.  The windows were hung with graceful and brilliant draperies.  Every arrangement of the office betokened luxury and indolence, rather than the severe toil and privation to which the aspirant for legal honors must so often submit.  The costly appurtenances of the apartment seemed to indicate that the young lawyer’s path to fame was over a velvet lawn, bedecked with beautiful flowers, rather than the rough road, steep and crooked, over which the greatest statesmen and most eminent jurists have trodden.

The occupant of this chamber was stretched at full length upon one of the luxurious lounges, puffing, with an abstracted air, a fragrant regalia.  He was a young man, not more than five-and-twenty years of age, and what ladies of taste would have styled decidedly handsome.  His face was pale, with a certain haggard appearance, which indicates the earlier stages of dissipation.  His complexion was of a delicate white, unbrowned by the southern sun, and the skin was so transparent that the roots of his black beard were visible beneath its surface.  His jet-black hair hung in rich, wavy curls, which seemed to be the especial care of some renowned tonsorial artist, so gracefully and accurately were they arranged.  His black eye was sharp and expressive when his mind was excited in manly thought; but now it was a little unsteady,—­disposed to droop, and wander, as though ashamed to express the emotions which agitated his soul.  Altogether, his features were classic; but there was something about them which the moralist would not like—­a sort of lascivious softness mingling with the nobler intellectual expression, that warned him to beware of the Siren, while he admired the Apollo.

The marks of vice were visible in his countenance.  They had not yet become canker-spots on the surface, but they rankled and festered beneath that fair field of physical and intellectual grandeur.

The young attorney was dressed in the extreme of fashion, yet in good taste.  Though he wore all the fashion demanded, he did not court ridicule by overstepping its flickering lines.  He was not the over-dressed dandy, but the full-dressed gentleman of refined taste, in his external appearance.

Anthony Maxwell had been educated at a northern institution.  A year before his introduction to the reader, he had entered his father’s office in the capacity of a partner, where, by an assumed devotion to business, he had effectually deceived his father and his clients into the belief that he was a steady, industrious young man.  His talents were of a very respectable order, which, superadded to a native eloquence and an engaging demeanor, had enabled him to acquit himself with much credit in the cases intrusted to his management.  A few months after his professional debut, his father’s decease had placed him in possession