MR. EAMES. 205 



stand has since been altered to one of a darker hue, 

 answered to the summons. ' When are the carpets 

 ' to be put down,' enquired Mr. Eames, surveying 

 the then bare floor with a shudder. ' I don't 

 know Sir.'* Don't you ? then light the fire.' The 

 waiter vanished for a candle wherewith to do his 

 bidding. While he is absent it may not be amiss 

 to depict the character of the club member who 

 despatched him on his errand. 



Mr. Wilfred Eames was the younger son of a 

 country gentleman of some distinction, and was 

 bred to the law. The habits of rigid demonstra- 

 tion and of accurate research which that science 

 engenders, had rendered him cautious and scep- 

 tical. He did not perhaps go quite the length of 

 Mr. Worldly Wiseman in Steeven's Lecture on 

 Heads, who disinherited his only son because he 

 could not give a reason why a black hen laid a 

 white egg, yet he was, sooth to say, of a mighty 

 incredulous complection. Upon the subject of the 

 formation of this world, he entertained a notion 

 which I have met with in some American writer. 

 He opined that some few millions of years ago, a 

 vagrant comet had, by collision with the sun, struck 

 off a portion of that luminary in a slanting direc- 

 tion, and in a state of fusion. The portions thus 

 separated, had, whilst whirling round its parent 

 sun, been gradually cooling from that time to the 

 present, and his notion was that at no very distant 



