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 mediaeval heraldry.
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