fable which is here set down.  O mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!  But though the preacher trips, shall not the doctrine be good?  Yea, brethren!  Here be the rods.  Look you, here are the scourges.  Choose me a nice long, swishing, buddy one, light and well-poised in the handle, thick and bushy at the tail.  Pick me out a whip-cord thong with some dainty knots in it—­and now—­we all deserve it—­whish, whish, whish!  Let us cut into each other all round.

A favorite liar and servant of mine was a man I once had to drive a brougham.  He never came to my house, except for orders, and once when he helped to wait at dinner so clumsily that it was agreed we would dispense with his further efforts.  The (job) brougham horse used to look dreadfully lean and tired, and the livery-stable keeper complained that we worked him too hard.  Now, it turned out that there was a neighboring butcher’s lady who liked to ride in a brougham; and Tomkins lent her ours, drove her cheerfully to Richmond and Putney, and, I suppose, took out a payment in mutton-chops.  We gave this good Tomkins wine and medicine for his family when sick—­we supplied him with little comforts and extras which need not now be remembered—­and the grateful creature rewarded us by informing some of our tradesmen whom he honored with his custom, “Mr. Roundabout?  Lor’ bless you!  I carry him up to bed drunk every night in the week.”  He, Tomkins, being a man of seven stone weight and five feet high; whereas his employer was—­but here modesty interferes, and I decline to enter into the avoirdupois question.

Now, what was Tomkins’s motive for the utterance and dissemination of these lies?  They could further no conceivable end or interest of his own.  Had they been true stories, Tomkins’s master would still, and reasonably, have been more angry than at the fables.  It was but suicidal slander on the part of Tomkins—­must come to a discovery—­must end in a punishment.  The poor wretch had got his place under, as it turned out, a fictitious character.  He might have stayed in it, for of course Tomkins had a wife and poor innocent children.  He might have had bread, beer, bed, character, coats, coals.  He might have nestled in our little island, comfortably sheltered from the storms of life; but we were compelled to cast him out, and send him driving, lonely, perishing, tossing, starving, to sea—­to drown.  To drown?  There be other modes of death whereby rogues die.  Good-by, Tomkins.  And so the nightcap is put on, and the bolt is drawn for poor T.

Suppose we were to invite volunteers amongst our respected readers to send in little statements of the lies which they know have been told about themselves; what a heap of correspondence, what an exaggeration of malignities, what a crackling bonfire of incendiary falsehoods, might we not gather together!  And a lie once set going, having the breath of life breathed into it by the father of lying, and ordered to run its diabolical little course, lives with a prodigious vitality.