EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VIGNETTES. A THE JOURNAL TO STELLA. DIM light was burning in the back room of a first-floor in Bury Street, St. James's. The apartment it irradiated was not an extensive one; and the furniture, sufficient rather than sumptuous, had that indefinable lack of physiognomy which only lodging-house furniture seems to possess. There was no fireplace; but in the adjoining parlour, partly visible through the open door, the last embers were dying in a grate from which the larger pieces of coal had been carefully lifted out and ranged in order on the hobs. Across the heavy high-backed chairs in the bedroom lay various neatly-folded garments, one of which was the black gown with pudding sleeves commonly worn in public by the eighteenthcentury divine, while at the bottom of the bed hung a clerical-looking periwig. In the bed itself, and leaning toward a tall wax candle at his side (which, from a faint smell of singed woollen still lingering about the chamber, must recently have come into contact with the now tucked-back bed-curtain), was a gentleman of forty or thereabouts, writing in a very small hand upon a very large sheet of paper, folded, for greater convenience, into one long horizontal slip. He had dark, fierce-looking eyebrows, an aquiline nose, full-lidded and rather prominent clear blue eyes, a firmly-cut, handsome mouth, and a wide, massive forehead, the extent of which was, for the moment, abnormally exaggerated by the fact that, in the energy of composition, the fur-lined cap he had substituted for his wig had been slightly tilted backward. As his task proceeded, his expression altered from time to time; now growing grave and stern, now inexpressibly soft and tender. Occasionally the look almost passed into a kind of grimace, resembling nothing so much as the imitative motion of the lips which one makes in speaking to a pet bird. He continued writing until, in the distance, the step of the watchman-first pausing deliberately, then moving slowly forward for a few paces—was heard in the street below. 'Past twelve o'clock !' came a wheezy cry at the window. Paaaaast twelvvve o'clock!' followed the writer, dragging |