by those who may be drawn, by some temporary and present pleasure, from the contemplation of their misery.  We feel, in such cases, that the darkness is upon us, even while the image of the calamity is not before the mind; nay, it sometimes requires an effort to bring it back, when anxious to account for our depression; but when it comes, the heart sinks with a shudder, and we feel, that, although it ceased to engage our thoughts, we had been sitting all the time beneath its shadow.  For this reason, although Fardorougha’s own loss absorbed, in one sense, all his powers of suffering, still he knew that something else pressed with additional weight upon his heart.  Of its distinct character, however, he was ignorant, and only felt that a dead and heavy load of multiplied affliction bent him in burning anguish to the earth.

There is something more or less eccentric in the gait and dress of every miser.  Fardorougha’s pace was naturally slow, and the habit for which, in the latter point, he had all his life been remarkable, was that of wearing a great-coat thrown loosely about his shoulders.  In summer it saved an inside one, and, as he said, kept him cool and comfortable.  That he seldom or never put his arms into it arose from the fact that he knew it would last a much longer period of time than if he wore it in the usual manner.

On leaving the attorney’s office, he might be seen creeping along towards the County Treasurer’s, at a pace quite unusual to him; his hollow, gleaming eyes were bent on the earth; his Gothamore about his shoulders; his staff held with a tight desperate grip, and his whole appearance that of a man frightfully distracted by the intelligence of some sudden calamity.

He had not proceeded far on this hopeless errand, when many bitter confirmations of the melancholy truth, by persons whom he met on their return from P——­’s residence, were afforded him.  Even these, however, were insufficient to satisfy him; he heard them with a vehement impatience, that could not brook the bare possibility of the report being true.  His soul clung with the tenacity of a death—­grip to the hope, that however others might have suffered, some chance might, notwithstanding, still remain in Ms particular favor.  In the meantime, he poured out curses of unexampled malignity against the guilty defaulter, on whose head he invoked the Almighty’s vengeance with a venomous fervor which appalled all who heard him.  Having reached the treasurer’s house, a scene presented itself that was by no means calculated to afford him consolation.  Persons of every condition, from the squireen and gentleman farmer, to the humble widow and inexperienced orphan, stood in melancholy groups about the deserted mansion, interchanging details of their losses, their blasted prospects, and their immediate ruin.  The cries of the widow, who mourned for the desolation brought upon her and her now destitute orphans, rose in a piteous wail to heaven, and the industrious fathers of many struggling families, with pale faces and breaking hearts, looked in silent misery upon the closed shutters and smokeless chimneys of their oppressor’s house, bitterly conscious that the laws of the boasted constitution under which they lived, permitted the destroyer of hundreds to enjoy, in luxury and security, the many thousands of which, at one fell and rapacious swoop, he had deprived them.