manner, that he "thought he know a man"
who could tell me, of his own experience,
what I wanted to learn. An appointment
was made for a certain evening at Benting's
house. I arrived first, and had not observed
for more than five minutes that Benting was
under a curious cloud, when his servant
announced—in a hushed, and I may say
unearthly manner—"Mr. John." A rather
stiff and shabby person appeared, who called
Benting by no name whatever (a singularity
that I always observed whenever I saw them
together afterwards), and whose manner was
curiously divided between familiarity and
distance. I found this man to have been all over
the Indies, and to possess an extraordinary
fund of traveller's experience. It came from
him drily at first; but he warmed, and it flowed
freely until he happened to meet Benting's
eye. Then, he subsided again, and (it
appeared to me), felt himself, for some unknown
reason, in danger of losing that weekly allowance.
This happened a dozen times in a couple
of hours, and not the least curious part of the
matter was, that Benting himself was always
as much disconcerted as the other man. It
did not occur to me that night, that this was
Benting's brother, for I had known him very
well indeed for years, and had always
understood him to have none. Neither can I now
recall, nor, if I could, would it matter, by
what degrees and stages I arrived at the
knowledge. However this may be, I knew it,
and Benting knew that I knew it. But, we
always preserved the fiction that I could
have no suspicion that there was any sort of
kindred or affinity between them. He went
to Mexico, this John—and he went to
Australia—and he went to China—and he died
somewhere in Persia—and one day, when we
went down to dinner at Benting's, I would
find him in the dining-room, already seated
(as if he had just been counting the allowance
on the table-cloth), and another day I would
hear of him as being among scarlet parrots in
the tropics; but, I never knew whether he
had ever done anything wrong, or whether he
had ever done anything right, or why he went
about the world, or how. As I have already
signified, I get into habits of believing; and I
have got into a habit of believing that Mr.
John had something to do with the dip of the
magnetic needle—he is all vague and shadowy
to me, however, and I only know him for
certain to have been a smuggled relation.

Other people, again, put these contraband
commodities entirely away from the light, as
smugglers of wine and brandy bury tubs. I
have heard of a man who never imparted, to
his most intimate friend, the terrific secret
that he had a relation in the world, except
when he lost one by death; and then he
would be weighed down by the greatness of
the calamity, and would, refer to his bereavement
as if he had lost the very shadow of
himself, from whom he had never been
separated since the days of infancy. Within my
own experience, I have observed smuggled
relations to possess a wonderful quality of
coming out when they die. My own dear
Tom, who married my fourth sister, and who
is a great Smuggler, never fails to speak to
me of one of his relations newly deceased, as
though, instead of never having in the
remotest way alluded to that relative's
existence before, he had been perpetually
discoursing of it. "My poor, dear, darling Emmy,"
he said to me, within these six months, "she is
gone—I have lost her." Never until that
moment had Tom breathed one syllable to me
of the existence of any Emmy whomsoever
on the face of this earth, in whom he had the
smallest interest. He had scarcely allowed
me to understand, very distantly and
generally, that he had some relations "my
people," he called them—down in Yorkshire.
"My own dear, darling Emmy," says Tom,
notwithstanding, " she has left me for a better
world." (Tom must have left her for his own
world, at least fifteen years). I repeated, feeling
my way, "Emmy, Tom?" "My favourite
niece," said Tom, in a reproachful tone,
"Emmy, you know. I was her godfather,
you remember. Darling, fair-haired Emmy!
Precious, blue-eyed child!" Tom burst into
tears, and we both understood that
henceforth the fiction was established between
us that I had been quite familiar with
Emmy by reputation, through a series of
years.

Occasionally, smuggled relations are
discovered by accident: just as those tubs may
be, to which I have referred. My other half
—I mean, of course, my wife—once discovered
a large cargo in this way, which had
been long concealed. In the next street to
us, lived an acquaintance of ours, who was a
Commissioner of something or other, and
kept a handsome establishment. We used to
exchange dinners, and I have frequently
heard him at his own table mention his father
as a "poor dear good old boy," who had
been dead for any indefinite period. He
was rather fond of telling anecdotes of his
very early days, and from them it appeared
that he had been an only child. One summer
afternoon, my other half, walking in our
immediate neighbourhood, happened to perceive
Mrs. Commissioner's last year's bonnet (to
every inch of which, it is unnecessary to add
she could have sworn), going along before her
on somebody else's head. Having heard
generally of the swell mob, my good lady's
first impression was, tliat the wearer of this
bonnet belonged to that fraternity, had just
abstracted the bonnet from its place of repose,
was in every sense of the term walking off with
it, and ought to be given into the custody of
the nearest policeman. Fortunately, however,
my Susannah, who is not distinguished by
closeness of reasoning or presence of mind,
reflected, as it were by a flash of inspiration,
that the bonnet might have been given away.
Curious to see to whom, she quickened her