'Unfortunately, two female cousins arrived soon after you went away, and I was obliged to escort Annie and Mrs Rivers home again.' A wild shriek—yell is perhaps the more appropriate expression—burst from the conscience and fear-stricken man. Another instant, and he had torn his watch from the fob, glanced at it with dilated eyes, dashed it on the table, and was rushing madly towards the door, vainly withstood by Elsworthy, who feared we had gone too far.
'Out of the way!' screamed the madman. 'Let go, or I'll dash you to atoms!' Suiting the action to the threat, he hurled my brother-in-law against the wall with stunning force, and rushed on, shouting incoherently: 'My horse! There is time yet! Tom Edwards, my horse!'
Tom Edwards was luckily at hand, and although mightily surprised at the sudden uproar, which he attributed to Mr Dutton being in drink, mechanically assisted to saddle, bridle, and bring out the roan mare; and before I could reach the stables, Dutton's foot was in the stirrup. I shouted 'Stop' as loudly as I could, but the excited horseman did not heed, perhaps not hear me: and away he went, at a tremendous speed, hatless, and his long gray-tinted hair streaming in the wind. It was absolutely necessary to follow. I therefore directed Elsworthy's horse, a much swifter and more peaceful animal than Dutton's, to be brought out; and as soon as I got into the high country road, I too dashed along at a rate much too headlong to be altogether pleasant. The evening was clear and bright, and I now and then caught a distant sight of Dutton, who was going at a frantic pace across the country, and putting his horse at leaps that no man in his senses would have attempted. I kept the high-road, and we had thus ridden about half an hour perhaps, when a bright flame about a mile distant, as the crow flies, shot suddenly forth, strongly relieved against a mass of dark wood just beyond it. I knew it to be Dutton's house, even without the confirmation given by the frenzied shout which at the same moment arose on my left hand. It was from Dutton. His horse had been staked, in an effort to clear a high fence, and he was hurrying desperately along on foot. I tried to make him hear me, or to reach him, but found I could do neither: his own wild cries and imprecations drowned my voice, and there were impassable fences between the high-road and the fields across which he madly hasted.
The flames were swift this time, and defied the efforts of the servants and husbandmen who had come to the rescue, to stay, much less to quell them. Eagerly as I rode, Dutton arrived before the blazing pile at nearly the same moment as myself, and even as he fiercely struggled with two or three men, who strove by main force to prevent him from rushing into the flames, only to meet with certain death, the roof and floors of the building fell in with a sudden crash. He believed that all was over with the child, and again hurling forth the wild despairing cry I had twice before heard that evening, he fell down, as if smitten by lightning, upon the hard frosty road.
It was many days ere the unhappy, sinful man recovered his senses, many weeks before he was restored to his accustomed health. Very cautiously had the intelligence been communicated to him, that Annie had not met the terrible fate, the image of which had incessantly pursued him through his fevered dreams. He was a deeply grateful, and, I believe, a penitent and altogether changed man. He purchased, through my agency, a valuable farm in a distant county, in order to be out of the way, not only of Hamblin, on whom he settled two hundred a year, but of others, myself included, who knew or suspected him of the foul intention he had conceived against his son-in-law, and which, but for Mrs Rivers, would, on the last occasion, have been in all probability successful, so cunningly had the evidence of circumstances been devised. 'I have been,' said James Dutton to me at the last interview I had with him, 'all my life an overweening self-confident fool. At Romford, I boasted to you that my children should ally themselves with the landed gentry of the country, and see the result! The future, please God, shall find me in my duty—mindful only of that, and content, whilst so acting, with whatever shall befall me or mine.'
Dutton continues to prosper in the world; Hamblin died several years ago of delirium tremens; and Annie, I hear, will in all probability marry into the squirearchy of the country. All this is not perhaps what is called poetical justice, but my experience has been with the actual, not the ideal world.
MEMORIALS OF THE DODO.
Among the thousand-and-one marvels displayed in the far-famed Palace of Crystal during part of the last ever-memorable year, not the least puzzling to the majority of visitors, was an object resembling a stuffed bird more than any other production of art or nature, but very unlike any bird previously observed by the wondering spectators in either museum or menagerie, or even on the painted panels that emblazon the crude and extravagant conceptions of mediæval heraldry. In the catalogue, the really ingenious piece of workmanship was entitled a 'Life-size model of the dodo'—a name, our readers know, appertaining to a now extinct bird, the very existence of which was at one time denied by shrewd men and good naturalists. Perhaps the following history of this curious creature, from its first to its last appearance before the eyes of men, will not be considered devoid of interest.