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438 MRS. L. N. MONMOUTH. into debt, and, in six years, he owed twenty-five thousand dollars. From that time to the end of his life, he was possessed of two raging manias — a mania to get into debt, and a mania to work out of debt. But it is so easy to spend ! He sometimes received five thousand dollars a month for literary labor, and sold one story to a news- paper for four thousand dollars. Rising from his bed at midnight, he kept' at work all the rest of the night, and most of the next day, till five in the afternoon ; but his debts grew apace and speedily reached a total of fifty thousand dollars. Then, of course, he must needs buy a house and set about improving its garden. He appears not to have known what was the matter. He wondered that he should be so pestered with debts. " Why am 1 in debt?" he asks. He died insolvent, after making millions by his pen, and at the very moment almost of his death he was buying an antique costume for thirty thousand francs, and concluding bargains for pictures and ancient needle- work. There is an interesting passage in the memoirs of George Ticknor, where he speaks of his two visits to Abbotsford, the big house that brought low the magnifi- cent head of Sir Walter Scott. When Mr. Ticknor first visited the author of " Marmion," his abode was a modest, comfortable establishment, quite sufficient for a reasonable family of liberal income. When he paid his second visit, Sir Walter having in the interval made and lost a great fortune, Abbotsford had grown into a costly, extensive, nondescript, preposterous mansion. The moment his eyes fell upon it he understood Sir Walter's ruin. That toy house was his ruin. The American visitor discovered among its grandeurs the apartment he had occupied twenty years before, reduced in rank and office, but still recognizable, and he could not but lament