"O King ofblight and sorrow, send me not away till I have brought back the light and joy that will make your dark home bright and beautiful again.

'Morning, morning, morning!' said Mr Boffin, with a wave of his hand, as the office door was opened by the dismal boy, whose appropriate name wasBlight. 'Governor in?'

And he smiled so pleasantly at his own wit that the provinces of Ghargaroo, M'gwana, and Scowow were affected with ablight.

"Fading, with the Night, the clouds of ignorance, and the deadlyblight of sin, and the silent tears of sorrow: and ever rising, higher, higher, with the Day, the radiant dawn of knowledge, and the sweet breath of purity, and the throb of a world's ecstasy!

'Tis thus, O boy, that Autumn comes, the cold Pitiless autumn of the wrack and mist, Autumn, the season of the cloudless sky, Autumn, of biting blasts, the time ofblight And desolation; following the chill Stir of disaster, with a shout it leaps Upon us.

Only a very few days more - appallingly few to the hearts which had set themselves bravely to hope against hope - three weeks, a month later, perhaps, the name of ships under theblight of the "Overdue" heading shall appear again in the column of "Shipping Intelligence," but under the final declaration of "Missing."

Ablight is on our harvest in the ear, Ablight upon the grazing flocks and herds, Ablight on wives in travail; and withal Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague Hath swooped upon our city emptying The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.

But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodilyblight. It was merely the condensation of the man.

But there were strong cords pulling him back from that abrupt departure: theblight on his happiness in thinking of Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance which was also despair.

THE happiest day-the happiest hour My seared andblighted heart hath known, The highest hope of pride and power, I feel hath flown.

"Which do we live on--a splendid one or ablighted one?"

There was the same thick air, difficult to breathe; the sameblighted ground, the same hopeless prospect, the same misery and distress.