friends, Mr. Richard, let us part liberally. A delightful
sentiment, sir!"

To all these rambling observations, Mr. Swiveller an-
swered not one word, but, returning for the aquatic jacket,
rolled it into a tight round ball, looking steadily at Brass
meanwhile as if he had some intention of bowling him down
with it. He only took it under his arm, however, and
marched out of the office in profound silence. Directly he
had closed the door, he opened it, stared in again for a few
moments with the same portentous gravity; and nodding
his head once, in a slow and ghost-like manner, vanished.

He paid the coachman and turned his back on Bevis
Marks, big with great designs for the comforting of Kit's
mother and the aid of Kit himself.

But the lives of gentlemen devoted to such pleasures as
Richard Swiveller, are extremely precarious. The spiritual
excitement of the last fortnight, working upon a system
affected in no slight degree by the spirituous excitement
of some years, proved a little too much for him. That very
night, Mr. Richard was seized with an alarming illness,
and in twenty-four hours was stricken with a raging fever.

TOSSING to and fro upon his hot, uneasy bed; tormented
by a fierce thirst which nothing could appease; unable to
find, in any change of posture, a moment's peace or ease;
and rambling ever through deserts of thought where there
was no resting-place, no sight or sound suggestive of re-
freshment or repose, nothing but a dull eternal weariness,
with no change but the restless shiftings of his miserable
body, and the weary wanderings of his mind, constant still
to one ever-present anxiety--to a sense of something left
undone, of some fearful obstacle to be surmounted, of some
carking care that would not be driven away, and haunted
the distempered brain, now in this form, now in that--
always shadowy and dim, but recognisable for the same
phantom in every shape it took, darkening every vision like
an evil conscience, and making slumber horrible; in these
slow tortures of his dread disease, the unfortunate Richard
lay wasting and consuming inch by inch, until at last, when
he seemed to fight and struggle to rise up, and to be held

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