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your future welfare and happiness, and is also the central point of interest in this story in which we are two of the principal characters. Therefore, arm yourself with fortitude, and prepare to hear it as becomes a heroine.”
    “Very well, my father,” returned the dutiful girl, but will you kindly tell me exactly what to do.”
    “Clasp your hands convulsively, lean forwards attentively, and with an expression of anxious horror on your beautiful features, exclaim, ‘Speak, speak, my father; I can bear the worst’”
    The Lady Ermetta followed his directions to the eighth part of an affygraffy.
    “You know, my child, that in the third and last chapter you are to be married, as becomes a heroine; and you also know that Baron Gadzooks is the bridegroom elect. But you do not know that a dark secret hangs over his birth, a secret which I am now about to reveal, therefore listen attentively.”
    “I am all ears,” said the lovely girl.
    “My dearest, that is a most irrational remark; now, really, how can you be all ears?”
    The Lady Ermetta blushed to the tips of the articles in question, and muttered something that sounded like a request for her father to go and put his boots on.
    “Silence, Ermetta!” said her father sternly, “such conduct is unbecoming in the heroine of a novel. Now, listen to me— The Baron was changed at birth.”
    “Then Baron Gadzooks—”
    “Is somebody else.”
    “And somebody else?”
    “Is the Baron. You now comprehend the situation.”
    “Not altogether, my father, you have neglected to inform me who somebody else is.”
    “That, my dear child, is a question that even the author could not answer.”
    “Then supposing that I marry the Baron, I in fact marry ‘somebody else,’ and as you say that ‘somebody else’ is the Baron, why of course my husband will be the Baron.”
    “How the deuce is that?” said the Marquis; “let’s see. If you marry the Baron—, but you can’t marry the Baron, because he’s not the Baron—he was changed at birth,”
    “He’s somebody else.”
    “Yes, exactly.”
    “Then, as he is not the Baron, somebody else is the Baron.”
    “Well, yes, I suppose so.”
    “Then, again, if I marry Gadzooks, I marry ‘somebody else,’ and somebody else, you say, papa, is the Baron,” said the Lady Ermetta, triumphantly. “Come now,” she added rather maliciously, “I think you are a little irrational now.”
    “Really Ermetta, you will look at the matter from only one point of view; don’t you see that he’s not the right somebody else. There are any amount of somebodies else; but let me tell you all about it. This important secret came out in a conversation that was overheard to pass between two servants. One was the nurse of the then infant Gadzooks, the other was a fellow servant. The nurse was heard to make the following remark about her youthful charge:— ‘The blessed dear was a layin in my arms as quiet as a lamb, and smiling like a cherrup, when he changed all of a sudden, and has been that cross and frakshus ever since that I ain’t had a minnit’s peace with him.’ The person who overheard this startling disclosure was a devoted friend of the family; he acted with decision and promptitude. The servants were first got rid of—one was strangled, the other hung. He then took the secret, hushed it into a sound sleep, wrapped it carefully in tissue paper, and put it into a box.”
    “Then where is the danger to come from?”
    “Here lies the danger. When that devoted friend put the secret into the box he made a fatal mistake—he put it into the wrong box, and the secret might awake and find itself.”
    “In the wrong box! How truly awful.”
    “It is indeed; it might awake at the very moment of your marriage, and forbid the ceremony to proceed. There’s no knowing to what lengths a secret that’s been kept asleep, in the wrong box for many years might proceed when once awakened.”
    The Lady Ermetta sobbed deeply. “I can