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CHAPTER V.

It is asserted by those learned men who have devoted their lives to the study of the manners and habits of insect society, that when a spider has lost its last web, having exhausted all the glutinous matter wherewith to spin another, it still protracts its innocent existence by obtruding its nippers on some less warlike but more respectable spider, possessed of a convenient home and an airy larder. Observant moralists have noticed the same peculiarity in the Man-Eater, or Pocket-Cannibal.

Eleven o'clock, a. m. Samuel Adolphus Poole, Esq., is in his parlor—the house one of those new dwellings which yearly spring up north of the Regent's Park—dwellings that, attesting the eccentricity of the national character, task the fancy of the architect and the gravity of the beholder—each tenement so tortured into contrast with the other, that, on one little rood of ground, all ages seem blended, and all races encamped. No. 1 is an Egyptian tomb—Pharaohs may repose there! No. 2 is a Swiss chalet—William Tell may be shooting in its garden! Lo! the severity of Doric columns—Sparta is before you! Behold that Gothic porch—you are rapt to the Norman days! Ha! those Elizabethan mullions—Sidney and Raleigh rise again! Ho! the trellises of China—come forth, Confucius and Commissioner Yeh! Passing a few paces, we are in the land of the Zegri and Abencerage—

"Land of the dark-eyed Maid and dusky Moor."

Mr. Poole's house is called Alhambra Villa! Moorish verandas—plate-glass windows, with cusped heads and mahogany sashes—a garden behind, a smaller one in front—stairs ascending to the door-way under a Saracenic portico, between two pedestalled lions that resemble poodles—the whole new and lustrous—in semblance stone, in substance stucco—cracks in the stucco denoting "settlements." But the house being let for ninety-nine years—relet again on a running lease of seven, fourteen, and twentyone—the builder is not answerable for duration, nor the original lessee for repairs. Take it altogether, than Alhambra Villa masonry could devise no better type of modern taste and metropolitan speculation.

Mr. Poole, since we saw him, between four and five years ago, has entered the matrimonial state. He has married a lady of some money, and become a reformed man. He has eschewed the turf, relinquished belcher neckcloths and Newmarket coats—dropped his old bachelor acquaintances. When a man marries