“Thanks, friend,” he then exclaimed; “I have been agreeably mistaken in you, I find.  You are—­you must be—­no other than my worthy host of the ‘Hedge.’  Poor Dives!  D—­n the glutton; after all, I pity him, and would fain hope that he has got relief by this time.  As for Lazarus, I fear that his condition in life was no better than it deserved.  If he had been a trump, now, and anxious to render good for evil, he would have dropped a bottle of aquapura to the suffering glutton, for if worthy Dives did nothing else, he fed the dogs that licked the old fellow’s sores.  Fie, for shame, old Lazarus, d—­n me, if I had you back again, but we’d teach you sympathy for Dives; and how so, my friend of the hawthorn—­why, we’d send him to the poor-house,* or if that wouldn’t do, to the mad-house—­to the mad-house.  Oh, my God—­my God! what is this?  Where are you bringing me, sir? but I know—­I feel it—­this destiny that’s over me!”

     * It is to be presumed, that Fenton speaks here from his
     English experience.  We find no poor-houses at the time.

He again became silent for a time, but during the pause, we need scarcely say, that the pernicious draught began to operate with the desired effect.

“That mask,” he then added, as if speaking to himself, “bodes me nothing but terror and persecution, and all this in a Christian country, where there are religion and laws—­at least, they say so—­as for raypart, I could never discover them.  However, it matters not, let us clap a stout heart to a steep brae, and we may jink them and blink them yet; that’s all.

     There was a little bird, a very little bird,
     And a very little bird was he;
     And he sang his little song all the summer day long,
     On a branch of the fair green-wood tree. 
     Heigh ho!”

This little touch of melody, which he sang to a sweet and plaintive air, seemed to produce a feeling of mournfulness and sorrow in his spirit, for although the draught he had taken was progressing fast in its operations upon his intellect, still it only assumed a new and more affecting shape, and occasioned that singular form and ease of expression which may be observed in many under the influence of similar stimulants.

“Well,” he proceeded, “I will soon go home; that is one consolation!  There is a sickness, my friend, whoever you are, at my heart here, and in what does that sickness consist?  I will tell you—­in the memory of some beautiful dreams that I had when a child or little-boy:  I remember something about green fields, groves, dark mountains, and summer rivers flowing sweetly by.  This now, to be sure, is a feeling which but few can understand.  It is called homesickness, and assumes different aspects, my worthy friend.  Sometimes it is a yearning after immortality, which absorbs and consumes the spirit, and then we die and go to enjoy that which we have pined for.  Now, my worthy mute friend, mark me, in my case the malady is not