CHAPTER XLV.

THE CABINET OF A CHEF-DE-POLICE.

Whatever opinion may be formed of the character of the celebrated conspiracy of Georges and Pichegru, the mode of its discovery, and the secret rules by which its plans were detected, are among the great triumphs of police skill. From the hour when the conspirators first met together in London, to that last fatal moment when they expired in the Temple, the agents of Fouche never ceased to track them.

Their individual tastes and ambitions were studied; their habits carefully investigated; every thing that could give a clew to their turn of thought or mind well weighed; so that the Consular Government was not only in possession of all their names and rank, but knew thoroughly the exact amount of complicity attaching to each, and could distinguish between the reckless violence of Georges and the more tempered, but higher ambition of Moreau. It was a long while doubtful whether the great general would be implicated in the scheme. His habitual reserve--a habit less of caution than of constitutional delicacy--had led him to few intimacies, and nothing like even one close friendship; he moved little in society; he corresponded with none, save on the duties of the service. Fouche's well-known boast of, "Give me two words of a man's writing and I'll hang him," were then scarcely applicable here.

To attack such a man unsuccessfully, to arraign him on a weak indictment, would have been ruin; and yet Bonaparte's jealousy of his great rival pushed him even to this peril, rather than risk the growing popularity of his name with the army.

Fouche, and, it is said also, Talleyrand, did all they could to dissuade the First Consul from this attempt, but he was fixed and immutable in his resolve, and the Police Minister at once addressed himself to his task with all his accustomed cleverness.

High play was one of the great vices of the day. It was a time of wild and varied excitement, and men sought, even in their dissipations, the whirlwind passions that stirred them in active life. Moreau, however, was no gambler; it was said that he never could succeed in learning a game. He, whose mind could comprehend the most complicated question of strategy, was obliged to confess himself conquered by ecarte! So much for the vaunted intellectuality of the play-table! Neither was he addicted to wine. All his habits were temperate, even to the extent of unsociality.

A man who spoke little, and wrote less, who indulged in no dissipations, nor seemed to have taste for any, was a difficult subject to treat; and so Fouche found, as, day after day, his spies reported to him the utter failure of all their schemes to entrap him. Lajolais, the friend of Pichegru, and the man who betrayed him, was the chief instrument the Police Minister used to obtain secret information. Being well born, and possessed of singularly pleasing manners, he had the _entree_ of the best society of Paris, where his gay, easy humor made him a great favorite. Lajolais, however, could never penetrate into the quiet domesticity of Moreau's life, nor make any greater inroad on his intimacy than a courteous salutation as they passed each other in the garden of the Luxembourg. At the humble restaurant where he dined each day for two francs, the "General," as he was distinctively called, never spoke to any one. Unobtrusive and quiet, he occupied a little table in a recess of the window, and arose the moment he finished his humble meal. After this he was to be seen in the garden of the Luxembourg, with a cigar and a book, or sometimes, without either, seated pensively under a tree for hours together.

If he had been conscious of the "espionage" established all over his actions, he could scarcely have adopted a more guarded or more tantalizing policy. To the verbal communications of Pichegru and Armand Polignac, he returned vague replies; their letters he never answered at all, and Lajolais had to confess that, after two months of close pursuit, the game was as far from him as ever!

"You have come to repeat the old song to me, Monsieur Lajolais," said Fouche, one evening, as his wily subordinate entered the room; "you have nothing to tell me, eh?"

"Very little, Monsieur le Ministre, but still something. I have at last found out where Moreau spends all his evenings. I told you that about half-past nine o'clock every night all lights were extinguished in his quarters, and, from the unbroken stillness, it was conjectured that he had retired to bed. Now, it seems that, about an hour later, he is accustomed to leave his house, and crossing the Place de l'Odeon, to enter the little street called the 'Allee de Caire,' where, in a small house next but one to the corner, resides a certain officer, 'en retraite'--a Colonel Mahon, of the Cuirassiers."

"A Royalist?"

"This is suspected, but not known. His politics, however, are not in question here; the attraction is of a different order."

"Ha! I perceive; he has a wife or a daughter."

"Better still, a mistress. You may have heard of the famous Caroline de Stassart, that married a Dutchman named D'Aerschot."

"Madame Laure, as they called her," said Fouche, laughing.

"The same. She has lived as Mahon's wife for some years, and was as such introduced into society; in fact, there is no reason, seeing what society is in these days, that she should not participate in all its pleasures."

"No matter for that," broke in Fouche; "Bonaparte will not have it so. He wishes that matters should go back to the old footing, and wisely remarks, that it is only in savage life that people or vices go without clothing."

"Be it so, monsieur. In the present case no such step is necessary. I know her maid, and from her I have heard that her mistress is heartily tired of her protector. It was originally a sudden fancy, taken when she knew nothing of life--had neither seen any thing, nor been herself seen. By the most wasteful habits she has dissipated all, or nearly all, her own large fortune, and involved Mahon heavily in debt; and they are thus reduced to a life of obscurity and poverty--the very things the least endurable to her notions."

"Well, does she care for Moreau?" asked Fouche, quickly; for all stories to his ear only resolved themselves into some question of utility or gain.

"No, but he does for her. About a year back she did take a liking to him. He was returning from his great German campaign, covered with honors and rich in fame; but as her imagination is captivated by splendor, while her heart remains perfectly cold and intact, Moreau's simple, unpretending habits quickly effaced the memory of his hard-won glory, and now she is quite indifferent to him."

"And who is her idol now, for, of course, she has one?" asked Fouche.

"You would scarcely guess," said Lajolais.

"Parbleu! I hope it is not myself," said Fouche, laughing.

"No, Monsieur le Ministre, her admiration is not so well placed. The man who has captivated her present fancy is neither good-looking nor well-mannered; he is short and abrupt of speech, careless in dress, utterly indifferent to women's society, and almost rude to them."

"You have drawn the very picture of a man to be adored by them," said Fouche, with a dry laugh.

"I suppose so," said the other with a sigh; "or General Ney would not have made this conquest."

"Ah! it is Ney, then. And he, what of him?"

"It is hard to say. As long as she lived in a grand house of the Rue St. Georges, where he could dine four days a week, and, in his dirty boots and unbrushed frock, mix with all the fashion and elegance of the capital; while he could stretch full length on a Persian ottoman, and brush the cinders from his cigar against a statuette by Canova, or a gold embroidered hanging; while in the midst of the most voluptuous decorations he alone could be dirty and uncared for, I really believe that he did care for her, at least, so far as ministering to his own enjoyments; but in a miserable lodging of the 'Allee de Caire,' without equipage, lackeys, liveried footmen--"

"To be sure," interrupted Fouche, "one might as well pretend to be fascinated by the beauty of a landscape the day after it has been desolated by an earthquake. Ney is right! Well, now, Monsieur Lajolais, where does all this bring us to?"

"Very near to the end of our journey, Monsieur le Ministre. Madame, or mademoiselle, is most anxious to regain her former position; she longs for all the luxurious splendor she used to live in. Let us but show her this rich reward, and she will be our own!"

"In _my_ trade, Monsieur Lajolais, generalities are worth nothing. Give me details; let me know how you would proceed."

"Easily enough, sir; Mahon must first of all be disposed of, and perhaps the best way will be to have him arrested for debt. This will not be difficult, for his bills are every where. Once in the Temple, she will never think more of him. It must then be her task to obtain the most complete influence over Moreau. She must affect the deepest interest in the Royalist cause: I'll furnish her with all the watch-words of the party, and Moreau, who never trusts a man, will open all his confidence to a woman."

"Very good, go on!" cried Fouche, gathering fresh interest as the plot began to reveal itself before him.

"He hates writing; she will be his secretary, embodying all his thoughts and suggestions; and now and then, for _her own guidance_, obtaining little scraps in _his_ hand. If he be too cautious here, I will advise her to remove to Geneva, for change of air; he likes Switzerland, and will follow her immediately."

"This will do; at least it looks practicable," said Fouche, thoughtfully; "is she equal to the part you would assign her?"

"Ay, sir, and to a higher one, too! She has considerable ability, and great ambition; her present narrow fortune has irritated and disgusted her; the moment is most favorable for us."

"If she should play us false," said Fouche, half aloud.

"From all I can learn, there is no risk of this; there is a headlong determination in her, when once she has conceived a plan, from which nothing turns her; overlooking all but her object, she will brave any thing, do any thing to attain it."

"Bonaparte was right in what he said of Necker's daughter," said Fouche, musingly, "and there is no doubt it adds wonderfully to a woman's _head_, that she has no _heart_. And now, the price, Master Lajolais; remember that our treasury received some deadly wounds lately--what is to be the price?"

"It may be a smart one; she is not likely to be a cheap purchase."

"In the event of success--I mean of such proof as may enable us to arrest Moreau, and commit him to prison--" He stopped as he got thus far, and paused for some seconds--"Bethink you, then, Lajolais," said he, "what a grand step this would be, and how terrible the consequences if undertaken on rash or insufficient grounds. Moreau's popularity with the army is only second to one man's! His unambitious character has made him many friends; he has few, very few enemies."

"But you need not push matters to the last--an implied, but not a proven guilt would be enough; and you can pardon him!"

"Ay, Lajolais, but who would pardon _us_?" cried Fouche, carried beyond all the bounds of his prudence, by the thought of a danger so imminent. "Well, well, let us come back; the price--will that do?" And taking up a pen he scratched some figures on a piece of paper.

Lajolais smiled dubiously, and added a unit to the left of the sum.

"What! a hundred and fifty thousand francs!" cried Fouche.

"And a cheap bargain, too," said the other; "for, after all, it is only the price of a ticket in the Lottery, of which the great prize is General Ney!"

"You say truly," said the Minister; "be it so."

"Write your name there, then," said Lajolais, "beneath those figures; that will be warranty sufficient for my negotiation, and leave the rest to me."

"Nature evidently meant you for a _Chef-de-Police_, Master Lajolais."

"Or a cardinal! Monsieur le Ministre," said the other, as he folded up the paper, a little insignificant slip, scrawled over with a few figures, and an almost illegible word; and yet pregnant with infamy to one, banishment to another, ruin and insanity to a third.

This sad record need not be carried further. It is far from a pleasant task to tell of baseness unredeemed by one trait of virtue--of treachery, unrepented even by regret. History records Moreau's unhappy destiny--the pages of private memoir tell of Ney's disastrous connection; our own humble reminiscences speak of poor Mahon's fate, the least known of all, but the most sorrowful victim of a woman's treachery!

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

THE FLOATING ISLAND.

A LEGEND OF LOCH DOCHART.

One night in midsummer, a long, long time ago--so long ago that I may not venture to assign the date--the moon shone down, as it might have done last night, over the wild, lone shore of Loch Dochart. Upon a little promontory on its southern margin stood a girl, meanly clad, wasted, and wayworn. In her arms she bore a little babe, wrapped up in the folds of a plaid; and as she bent her thin, pallid face over that of the child, her rich, long, yellow hair fell in a shower around her, unconfined either by _snood_ or _curch_. One might have taken her for Magdalene, in her withered beauty, her penitence, and her grief; but other than Magdalene, in her passionate despair. She looked around her, and a shudder shook her feeble frame. Was it the chill of the night mist?--it might be; for as her eye wandered away toward the hills beyond, northward, the mists were creeping along their sides, and she saw the moonlight gleaming on a lowly cot, amid a fir grove. 'Twas the home of her parents, the home of her happy childhood, her innocent youth. She looked again at the little one in her bosom; it slept, but a spasm of pain wrung its pale, pinched, sharp features. It appeared to be feeble and pining, for sleepless nights and days of grief and tears had turned the milk of the mother to gall and poison, and the little innocent drank in death--death, the fruit of sin in all climes and ages. Gently she laid the little one by the margent of the water, amid the green rushes; and the breeze of night sweeping by murmured plaintively to them, and caused them to sigh, and rock to and fro around the infant. Then the poor mother withdrew a space from the babe, and sat her down upon a white stone, and covered her face with her long, thin, bloodless hands. She said in her heart, as Hagar said, "Let me not see the death of the child." And she wept sore, for the poor girl loved the babe, as a mother, like her, only can love her babe, with a wild, passionate, absorbing love, for it is her all, her pearl of great price, which she has bought with name and fame, with home and friends, with health and happiness, with earth, and, it may be, with heaven. And she thought bitterly over that happy home, where, a few months since, in the gloaming of the autumn's eve, she sat on the heathery braes, and tripped along the brink of the warbling burn, or milked the kine in the byre, or sang to her spinning-wheel beside her mother, near the ingle. Next came the recollection of one who sat beside her in the braes, and strayed with her down the burn; who won her heart with his false words, and drew her from the holy shelter of her father's roof, to leave her in her desolation among the southern strangers. And now, with the faithfulness--though not with the purity or trustfulness--of the dove, she was returning over the waste of the world's dark waters to that ark which had sheltered her early years--from which no father had sent her forth. The ark is in sight; but the poor bird is weary from her flight, and she would even now willingly fold her wings and sink down amid the waters, for she is full of shame, and fear, and sorrow. Ah! will her father "put forth his hand and take her in, and pull her in unto him into the ark," with the glory of her whiteness defiled, her plumage ruffled and drooping? Ah! will her mother draw her again to nestle within her bosom, when she sees the dark stain upon her breast, once so pure and spotless? The poor girl wept as she thought these things--at first wild and bitterly, but at length her sorrow became gentler, and her soul more calm, for her heavy heart was relieved by the tears that seemed to have gushed straight up from it, as the dark clouds are lightened when the rain pours from them. And so she sobbed and mused in the cold, dreary night, till her thoughts wandered and her vision grew dim, and she sank down in slumber--a slumber like that of childhood, sweet and deep. And she dreamed that angels, pure and white, stood around: and, oh! strange and charming, they looked not on her as the unfallen ones of the world--the pure and the sinless in their own sight--looked upon her through the weary days of her humiliation--scornfully, loathingly, pitilessly; but their sweet eyes were bent upon her full of ruth, and gentleness, and love; and tears like dew-pearls fell from those mild and lustrous orbs upon her brow and bosom, as those beautiful beings hung over her, and those tears calmed her poor wild brain, and each, where it fell upon her bosom, washed away a stain. Then the angels took the little one from her breast, and spread their wings as if for flight; but she put forth her arms to regain her child, and one of the bright beings repressed her gently, and said,

"It may not be--the babe goes with us."

Then said she to the angel, "Suffer me also to go with my child, that I may be with it and tend it ever."

But the angel said, in a voice of sweet and solemn earnestness, "Not yet--not yet. Thou mayest not come with us now, but in a little while shalt thou rejoin us, and this our little sister."

And the dreamer thought that they rose slowly on the moonlit air, as the light clouds float before a gentle breeze at evening; then the child stretched forth its arms toward her with a plaintive cry, and she awoke and sprang forward to where her child lay. The waters of the lake rippled over the feet of the mother, but the babe lay beyond in the rushes at the point of the promontory where she had laid it. The bewildered mother essayed to spring across the stream that now flowed between her and the island, but in vain; her strength failed her, and as she sank to the earth she beheld the island floating slowly away upon the waveless bosom of the lake, while eldritch laughter rang from out the rushes, mingled with sweet tiny voices soothing with a fairy lullaby the cries of the babe that came fainter and fainter on the ears of the bereaved mother, as the little hands of the elfin crew impelled the floating island over the surface of Loch Dochart.

Some herdsmen going forth in the early morning found a girl apparently lifeless lying on the edge of the lake. She was recognized and brought to her early home. When she opened her eyes her parents stood before her. No word of anger passed from the lips of her father, though his eye was clouded and his head was bowed down with sorrow and humiliation. Her mother took the girl's head and laid it on her bosom--as she had done when she was a little guileless child--and wept, and kissed her, and prayed over her. Then after a time she came to know those around her and where she was, and she started up and looked restlessly around, and cried out with a loud and wild cry, "My child! Where is my child!"

Near the spot where she had been discovered was found a portion of a baby's garment. The people feared the child had been drowned, and searched the loch along its shores. Nothing, however, was found which could justify their suspicions; but, to the astonishment of the searchers, they discovered in the midst of the lake a small island, about fifty feet in length, and more than half that in width, covered with rushes and water-plants. No one had ever seen it before, and when they returned with others to show the wonder, they found that it had sensibly changed its position. The home-returned wanderer whispered into her mother's ear all her sin and all her sorrow. Then she pined away day by day. And when the moon was again full in the heavens, she stole forth in the gloaming. She was missed in the morning, and searched for during many days, but no trace could be found of her. At length some fishermen passing by the floating island, scared a large kite from the rushes, and discovered the decaying body of the hapless girl. How she had reached the island none could say--whether it drifted sufficiently near the land to enable her to wade to it in her search for her babe, and then floated out again from the shore; or whether beings of whom peasants fear to speak had brought her there. The latter conjecture was, of course, the one more generally adopted by the people, and there are those who say that at midnight, when the moon shines down at the full upon Loch Dochart, he who has sharp ears may hear the cry of a baby mingling with elfish laughter and sweet low songs from amidst the plants and rushes of the floating island.

SIBERIA, AS A LAND OF POLITICAL EXILE.

From the reign of Peter the Great to the present moment, exile to Siberia as a punishment for political offenses, has been of constant recurrence, and most of the romance of Russian history is connected with the frozen steppes of that country. To enumerate all the illustrious names that have swelled the list of exiles up to the reign of Alexander, would be to write the history of the innumerable conspiracies which at various periods have shaken the throne of Russia, of the cruel caprices of a race of absolute and unscrupulous despots, and of the various individual passions which, under governments such as that of Russia, can always find means of making the public authorities the avengers of private hatreds. From the reign of Alexander up to the present time, sentence of exile to Siberia for political offenses has perhaps been more frequently pronounced than before; and as within this period the victims have mostly suffered for opinions, not for criminal deeds, and in many instances for opinions which, judged from the point of view of absolute right, must be pronounced to be noble and generous, though, in opposition to the reigning system in the country, the fate of these exiles has elicited the sympathy of Europe in a far higher degree than was ever called forth by the fall of court favorites, whose change of fortune was generally caused by an inordinate and selfish ambition. That to the latter, life in Siberia was but a succession of hardships, privations, and humiliations, history affirms; but what may be the fate of the exiles in the present day, there are no more authentic means of ascertaining than the narratives of the few west Europeans who have visited Siberia, and the inferences which may be drawn from the general system of convict colonization followed in the country, and from the spirit which pervades society there.

A regular system of convict colonization was commenced in 1754, during the reign of the Empress Elizabeth, who was too tender-hearted to sign the death-warrant even of the most atrocious criminal, though she tolerated and countenanced the most barbarous cruelties; but it was carried on without any attention to the necessities of the various localities, and was found not to work as favorably as might be desired. The existing irregularities having been brought to light, by the census taken in Siberia in 1819, new regulations were issued in 1822; and these were further improved upon in 1840, and brought into harmony with the improved penal code of the country. Notwithstanding the energetic endeavors of Peter the Great to force European civilization upon his people, he took little pains with regard to the necessary preliminary process of humanizing the penal laws of the country, and the most barbarous and degrading punishments continued, during his and several subsequent reigns, to be inflicted on persons of all ranks and both sexes. Torture in its most cruel forms was frequently applied, and the bodies of the criminals mutilated in the most inhuman manner, their noses and ears being cut off, and their tongues torn out by the root. Under the reign of Catharine II., mitigations were, however, introduced: torture was abolished, and the nobles, as also the burghers of the two first guilds, were exempted from corporeal punishment. The cruel and capricious Paul I., however, again gave to the world the sad and degrading spectacle of individuals of high social position and refined education wincing under the lash of the executioner; and to this day the knout and the cat-o'-nine-tails are reckoned among the instruments of correction in Russia. The punishments, as regulated by law at present, consist, according to the nature of the offense committed, in money fines, restitution, church penitence, loss of office, forfeiture of privileges and of honor, and in corporeal punishments of various kinds and degrees--regarding which it is, however, expressly stipulated that the sentence must not contain a recommendation "to flog without mercy," as was formerly the case--and in banishment to Siberia, which, in case of heinous offenses, is further sharpened by forced labor in the mines and manufactories. Capital punishment is reintroduced, but for crimes of high treason only, and is even in such cases but very rarely applied. From the execution of the Cossack rebel Pugatscher, which took place in Moscow, in 1775, fifty years elapsed before sentence of death was again pronounced in Russia, when five of the leaders of the insurrection of 1826, which had nearly deprived the Emperor Nicholas of the throne to which he had just succeeded, were sentenced to lose their lives at the hands of the hangman. The knout, in addition to hard labor for life in the mines of Siberia, is the general substitute for capital punishment; and up to 1822, all criminals under this last sentence were branded on the forehead, though the practice of slitting up the ears and nostrils, which continued in force until the reign of Alexander, was discontinued. In cases when the criminals are condemned to banishment for life, the sentence may be rendered still more rigorous by condemnation to _civil death_, in which cases alone the families of the convicts are not allowed to follow them into exile, and they are neither allowed to receive nor to write letters.

Kasan, in which city there is a bureau of dispatch for exiles, is the starting point of the detachments of convicts and exiles which periodically leave Russia for Siberia--their halting-places being indicated along the line of route by large four-winged wooden buildings, with yellow walls and red roofs, and surrounded by a stout palisade, erected at every post-station opposite the crown post-house. According to the improved regulations of 1840, the convicts condemned to forced labor are not allowed to travel in company with the criminals of lesser degree destined for immediate colonization, as was previously the case, but are sent in separate detachments, care being also taken that several days shall elapse between the departures of the successive detachments, so as to preclude all possibility of contact on the road. As far as can be judged from the very imperfect records which are available, the number of convicts transported to Siberia up to the year 1818 averaged 2500 yearly; but among these it may be presumed were not numbered the political exiles. In the year 1819, 3141 persons were transported; in 1820, the number swelled to 4051; and from that period until 1823, the annual number was from 4000 to 5000. In 1823 a ukase was issued, ordering that all vagrants who had until then been subjected to forced labor in the fortresses should in future be sent to Siberia as colonists. This of course greatly augmented the number transported; and during the period of six years which elapsed from the date of this ukase to 1829, 64,035 persons, or 10,067 individuals annually, were sent to people these uncultivated wilds. Among these, persons convicted of vagrancy only were, however, in a great majority, the number of criminal offenders condemned to hard labor, amounting only to one-seventh of the whole number. The number of women in proportion to that of the men was one to ten. The convicts travel on foot, all being, on starting, supplied with clothing at the public expense. The men walk in pairs; but, except in cases of extreme criminality, are rarely burdened with fetters during the journey. When passing through towns, however, irons are generally attached to their ankles, and every attempt at escape is punished with corporeal chastisement, without any reference to the cause of exile or the former social position of the individual. To each detachment are generally attached some wagons or sledges for the women, the aged, and the infirm; and these usually lead the van, the younger men following, and the whole party, commonly numbering from fifty to sixty individuals, being escorted from station to station by a detachment of the Cossacks stationed in the villages. That a journey of several thousand wersts on foot, and through such a country as Siberia, must cause much suffering, can not be doubted; but the stations are not at very great distances from each other, and travelers agree in asserting that the ostrogs--that is, fortified places--in which the convicts rest from their fatigues, afford as comfortable accommodation as any post-house throughout Siberia; besides which the inhabitants of the towns and villages through which they pass, either from that perverse sympathy which so frequently leads the unthinking masses to look upon a doomed felon as upon a victim of oppression, or from a knowledge of how many sufferers for mere opinion may be mixed up with the really guilty individuals in the troop, contribute in every way in their power to mitigate the hardships of their position. The officer commanding the escort is intrusted with the sum stipulated by law for the daily subsistence of each convict, and this must never, under any pretense, pass into the hands of the latter. Many tales are told of the barbarous treatment to which the exiles are subjected during their passage to their various places of destination; but this, it would seem, must be attributed to the general brutality of the men forming the escort, and not to any desire in the government to render in an indirect way the punishment of the condemned more severe than expressed in the terms of the sentence; though in these cases, as in all others, it is of course the despotic character of the government in Russia which prevents the complaints of the oppressed from being heard, and thus perpetuates all abuses.

The convicts who have committed heinous offenses, such as murder, burglary, highway robbery, or who have been judged guilty of high treason, and are banished for life and condemned to forced labor, are chiefly under the superintendence of the governor of Irkutsk, who determines whether they are to be employed in the mines and salt-works, or in the distilleries, or other manufactories of the crown. For each of these convicts government allows thirty-six paper rubles yearly; but the price of the necessaries of life being in Siberia so very low that the half of this suffices for the support of the convict, the other half goes to form a fund which, in case, after the lapse of four or six years, he gives proofs of reform, is given to him to begin life with in some part of the wide-spread steppes which admits of cultivation, and where a certain portion of land and materials for building a house are assigned to him. The house must, however, be erected by his own labor, and the money laid by for him be applied to the purchasing of the necessary utensils and implements for commencing house-keeping and agricultural pursuits. From this moment the convicts become _glebae adscripti_ in the strictest sense of the term, as they are, under no pretense whatsoever, allowed to quit the lands assigned to them, or to change their condition; thenceforward also they pay the capitation tax and other imposts in like manner as the other crown peasants of Siberia, and enjoy in return the same rights, such as they are. The children of these convicts, born during the parents' period of punishment, are bound to the soil; but their names are not enrolled among those of the exiles, and the law orders that they shall be treated in the same manner as the overseers of the works.

The second class of convicts is subdivided into five classes, namely, 1. Exiles sentenced to labor in the manufactories; 2. Those sentenced to form part of the labor companies engaged on the public works; 3. Those allowed to work at their respective trades; 4. Those hired out as domestic servants; and 5. Those destined to become colonists. The last-mentioned of these are at once established on the waste lands allotted to them, each person obtaining an area of not less than thirty acres, and being besides furnished with materials for building a house, with a cow, some sheep, agricultural implements, and seed corn. During the first three years these settlers are exempted from all imposts; during the next seven years they pay half the usual amount of taxes, and in addition to this, fifteen silver copeks annually toward an economical fund erected for their benefit. After the lapse of these ten years they take their rank among the other crown peasants, and are subjected to the same burdens. Except when especially pardoned, these colonists are not either allowed to change their condition, or arbitrarily to quit the lands allotted to them. Colonization, according to this system, being found excessively expensive, and at the same time very precarious, on account of the frequent desertion of the colonists, who, living without families, were bound by no ties, was given up in 1822, but has since been resumed. In order to promote the speedy amalgamation of the convict population with the free population, the government bestows on every free woman who marries one of these colonists a donation of fifty silver rubles; while the free man who takes to wife a female convict receives a donation of fifteen rubles. Persons enjoying the privilege of collecting gold from the sands of the government of Tomsk, and who employ convicts for the washings, are bound to pay, in addition to the daily wages, one ruble and fifteen copeks in silver toward the economical fund. The convicts employed as domestic servants are fed by their employers, and receive in wages one silver ruble and a half per month. After eight years of such compulsory service, these exiles may also become colonists, and be enrolled among the peasants of the crown. Convict colonists may, should the authorities deem it expedient, be allowed to work at trades in the towns, but they must not become members of corporations or guilds, and must never be considered as being withdrawn from their condition of colonists.

The convicts condemned to forced labor, and employed in the manufactories, are the most leniently dealt with of this class, their position being, indeed, such as to render the sentence a reward rather than a punishment. In the manufactories of Telma more than eight hundred convicts are employed, who receive in wages, according to the work executed by them, from six to fifty rubles per month, besides bread flour; and their wives, who dwell in the village, earn from two and a half to five rubles per month by spinning and weaving hemp. The convicts employed in manufactories, and receiving wages, are, however, generally such as have previously been under stricter discipline, and are in a state of transition toward the position of liberated colonists. In several towns of Siberia there are establishments for them during the first stage of their punishment. In these establishments, called _Remeslenui Dom_, or the House of Trades, the convicts are employed as joiners, turners, saddlers, wheelwrights, smiths, &c., and are housed, clothed, and fed at the public expense, but do not receive wages, their wives and children finding employment in other ways. All orders must be addressed to the officers intrusted with the superintendence of the establishments; but persons having work executed there are at liberty to enter the workshops, and to communicate directly with the different craftsmen, who are not chained, but are guarded by military. In winter, the hours of labor are eight, in summer, twelve. The proceeds of the labor of the convicts go to pay the expenses of the establishment, and the surplus is applied to charitable purposes, such as the building and maintenance of hospitals. The convict laborers in the mines of the Ural, as well as those of Nertchynsk, dwell together in large barrack-like buildings, the worst criminals among them being alone chained; but owing to the unhealthy nature of the mines, particularly those of Nertchynsk, their existence is a very miserable one. The usual term of compulsory labor in the mines is twenty years, at the expiration of which the convicts are generally established as colonists in the vicinity of the mines, and continue to labor in them, but as free laborers, receiving wages. In case there be at any time a scarcity of mining laborers, the authorities are at liberty to apply to this purpose exiles who have not been especially sentenced to this punishment; but in such cases the exiles are paid for their labor, and are not confined to the mines for more than one year, which counts, besides, for two years of exile. Upon the whole, great latitude is allowed the central and local authorities in Siberia with regard to the employment and allocation of the convicts and exiles, it being merely laid down as a general rule that agricultural settlements shall always be made in the least populous districts of the localities capable of cultivation. It seems also to be the plan, as far as possible, to put each man to the work which he is most competent to execute; and the exiles belonging to the laboring classes are therefore, in preference, established as agricultural colonists, while those belonging to the higher classes, who are unaccustomed to manual labor, are generally located in the towns, where it is easier for them to find some means of subsistence, which may relieve the government from the burden of their support. Even independently of the political exiles, the number of the latter is great, for exile is the punishment which usually follows the detection of those peculations and abuses of power of which the Russian officials are so frequently guilty. On their first arrival, it seems, the exiles of this class are made to do penance in the churches, under the guardianship of the police, but after a time they are allowed to go about unguarded; and it is said that, when exiled for life, the Russians even of high birth bear the change of fortune with extraordinary equanimity, assimilating in a very short time, and without any apparent struggle, to the Cossacks and peasants among whom they are thrown. When, as is frequently the case, they marry Siberian women, their children in no way differ from the people among whom they live. In the city of Tobolsk, in particular, there are a great many exiles belonging to the class of unfaithful _employes_, the sentence being considered less rigorous the nearer the place of exile to the frontiers of Russia Proper. Political exiles are, on the contrary, sent further north and east, where the nature of the surrounding country is such as to make an attempt at flight impossible, or at least very difficult. The hardships to which these exiles are subjected seem, in by far the greater number of cases, to be exclusively such as are necessarily connected with their being torn away from all they hold dear, and transplanted from the luxurious life of European society (for these exiles mostly belong to the higher classes) to the uncultivated wilds and rigorous climate of a country but very partially redeemed from a state of nature; but the tenderest sympathies of the natives of all races seem, by all accounts, to be readily bestowed upon the exiles, who, whatever be the nature of the offense of which they have been guilty, are never named by a harsher term than that of "unfortunates." In many cases the lot of the political exiles is also mitigated by the kindness of the local authorities, who allow them the use of books and other indulgences, and even receive them as friends in their houses, when this can be done without risk of giving offense at St. Petersburg.

As in Russia nothing with which the government is concerned can be commented on by the press without especial permission, it is difficult to ascertain correctly how far the system followed in Siberia works beneficially as regards the moral reformation of the criminals, and their relations to society in general. The accounts of travelers are very conflicting--some extolling the extreme leniency with which even the worst offenders are treated, as the _ne plus ultra_ of social policy, and dwelling with delight on its happy results; while others consider it disastrous in its consequences, and relate instances of the most atrocious crimes committed by the convicts, and of whole tracts of country in which life and property have been rendered insecure by their presence. The statistics of Siberia, however, prove the country to be improving; and all travelers agree as to the freedom from molestation which they have experienced while traversing its immeasurable steppes; and it is therefore but fair to conclude, that though the attempt at moral reformation may be unsuccessful in many instances, in general convict colonization has here borne good fruits. That great severity in the chastisement of new transgressions has been found necessary, is on the other side proved by the penal laws bearing exclusively on Siberia. According to these laws, drunkenness, fighting, idleness, theft of articles of small value, unallowed absence from the place of detention, are considered venial offenses, and are punished with from ten to forty lashes with the cat-o'-nine-tails; while desertion among the colonists is punished, the first time with simple flogging, the second and third time with the cat-o'-nine-tails. If the offense be persisted in after this, sentence is to be pronounced by the local tribunals, and often consists in temporary removement to some distant and thinly-populated district, or incorporation in one of the penal labor companies. Convicts condemned to hard labor who attempt to escape are punished with the knout, and are branded on the forehead, in case this mark of ignominy have not previously been inflicted on them. Repeated thefts, robberies, and other like offenses are punished in the same way as desertion; but in these cases the value of the object stolen is not so much taken into consideration as the motives by which the criminals are actuated, and the number of times the offense has been repeated. A fourth repetition by an exile of a crime previously punished renders him liable to forty lashes with the knout, and to being placed in the category of the convicts condemned to forced labor. Murder, highway robbery, and incendiarism are, if the offender be a simple exile, punished with from thirty-five to fifty lashes with the knout, in addition to branding on the forehead, and forced labor in irons for a period of not less than three years--the term beyond this being left to the judgment of the local tribunals. The convict condemned to forced labor who renders himself guilty of similar crimes receives fifty-five lashes of the knout, is branded on the forehead, and is chained to the wall of a prison for five years, after which period he is allowed to move about, but must continue to wear fetters during his life. Criminals of this class are never to be employed beyond the prison walls, and are not even in illness to be taken into the open air beyond the prison-yard, or to be relieved from their chains, except by especial permission of the superior authorities, which can only be granted in consequence of a medical certificate.

The river Irtysh is the Styx of the Siberian Hades: from the moment they cross the ferry in the neighborhood of the city of Tobolsk, the Russian _employes_ appointed to offices in Siberia are placed in the enjoyment of the higher grade of rank which they so much covet; and from the moment they cross this same ferry commences the extinction of the political life of the exiles. Here they exchange the name by which, until then, they have been known in the world, for one bestowed upon them by the authorities, and any change of the latter is punished with five years' compulsory labor over and above the original sentence. At Tobolsk sits the board which decides the final destination of each culprit or each martyr. It consists of a president and assessors, having under them a chancellerie divided into two sections, and has offices of dispatch in several of the towns of Siberia. Before their arrival at Tobolsk the convicts are, however, liable to be detained by the authorities of Kasan or Perm, for the public works, in their respective governments.

It is as the land of political exile that Siberia is generally known, and that it has gained so unenviable a reputation among the liberty-loving nations of Europe, whose imagination pictures it to them as a vast unredeemable desert, whose icy atmosphere chills the breath of life, and petrifies the soul. Yet the truly benevolent should rejoice in circumstances which have led a government that punishes a dissentient word as severely as the direst crime, to select exile as the extreme penalty of the law. Siberia is, it is true, the great prison-house of Russia; but it is a prison-house through which the blessed light of the sun shines, through which the free air of plain and mountain plays, and in which the prisoner, though he may not labor in a self-elected field, may still devote his faculties to the benefit of his fellow-creatures, and continue the great task of moral and intellectual progress. How different his lot from that of the Austrian prisoner of state, doomed to drag on long years of a miserable existence in the dungeons of Spielberg, or some other fortress, severed from all intercourse with the world beyond his prison-walls, deprived even of the light of day, and left in solitude and forced idleness to brood over his dark and despairing thoughts.

APPLICATION OF ELECTRO-MAGNETIC POWER TO RAILWAY TRANSIT.

One of the most wonderful characteristics of scientific discovery is the singular way in which every advance connects itself with past phases of progress. Each new victory over the stubborn properties of matter not only gives man increase of power on its own account, but also reacts on older conquests, and makes them more productive. Thirty years ago, Davy and Arago observed that iron-filings became magnetic when lying near a wire that was carrying a current of galvanic electricity. Since then powerful temporary magnets have been made for various purposes by surrounding bars of soft iron by coils of copper-wire, and transmitting electric currents through these. In fact, it has been ascertained that iron always becomes a magnet when electricity is passed round it. The alarm-bells of the electric telegraphs are set ringing by a simple application of this principle. A conducting wire is made to run for hundreds of miles, and then coils itself round an iron bar. Electric currents are sent at will through the hundreds of miles of wire, and the inert iron becomes an active magnet. Observe the clerk in the Telegraph Office at London. When he jerks the handle that is before him, he turns on a stream of electricity that runs to Liverpool or Edinburgh, as the case may be. In either of those places a piece of iron that is twisted round with the extremity of the wire becomes a magnet for an instant, and attracts to itself a steel armature that is connected with a train of wheel-work. The motion of the armature, as it is drawn up to the magnet, sets free a spring that was before kept quiet; and this gives token of its freedom by making an alarm-bell to ring. The clerk in London awakens the attention of the clerk in Edinburgh by turning a piece of soft iron placed near to the latter into a magnet for a few seconds. He is able to do this because currents of electricity induce magnetism in iron. This, and this alone, is the secret principle to which he is indebted for the wonderful power that enables him to annihilate space when he instantaneously attracts the attention of an ear hundreds of miles away.

It has recently been announced that this electro-magnetic induction has been made a means for the instantaneous registration of astronomical observations. We have already to draw attention to another practical application of the principle. M. Nikles has just invented an arrangement of apparatus that enables him to make the wheels of locomotives bite the rails with any degree of force without increasing the weight that has to be carried to the extent of a single grain. Our readers are aware that in wet weather the driving-wheels of locomotives often slip round upon the rail without acquiring the power of moving the weight that is attached behind them. Whenever they are asked to ascend inclined planes with a weight that is beyond the adhesive powers of their wheels this result invariably follows; and the only practical escape from the difficulty hitherto has been the adoption of one of two expedients--either to increase their own intrinsic weight, so that the earth's attraction might bind the wheels down more firmly, or to let the railway be level and the load to be dragged proportionally light. In either of these cases a waste of power is experienced. Power is either expended in moving a superfluous load, or the same amount of power drags less weight even upon a level rail than it otherwise could upon an ascending one, that would have required less outlay in its construction. It therefore becomes a great desideratum to find some means of making the locomotive wheels bite more tenaciously without increasing the load they have to carry. The important problem of how to do this it is that M. Nikles has solved.

If our readers will take a common horse-shoe magnet, and slide the connecting slip of steel that rests upon its ends backward and forward, they will feel that the slip sticks to the magnet with a certain degree of force. M. Nikles' plan is to convert the wheel of the locomotive into a magnet, and make it stick to the iron rail by a like adhesion. This he does by placing a galvanic battery under the body of the engine. A wire coming from the poles of this battery is then coiled horizontally round the lower part of the wheel, close to the rail, but in such a way that the wheel turns round freely within it, fresh portions of its circumference coming continually into relation with the coil. The part of the wheel in immediate contact with the rail is thus made magnetic, and therefore has a strong adhesion for the surface along which it moves--and the amount of the adhesion may be increased or diminished at any time, by merely augmenting or reducing the intensity of the galvanic current that circulates through the surrounding coil. By means of a handle the electricity may be turned on or off, and an effectual break be thus brought into activity that can make the iron rail smooth or adhesive according to the requirements of the instant, and this without in any way interfering with the free rotation of the wheels as the friction-breaks of necessity do. Increased adhesion is effected by augmented pressure, but the pressure results from an attraction that is altogether independent of weight. The lower portion of the wheel for the time being is in exactly the same condition as a bar of soft iron placed within a coil of wire circulating electricity. But as it rises up out of the coil during the rotation of the wheel, it grows less and less magnetic, the descending portions of the opposite side of the circumference acquiring increased magnetic power in the like degree.

M. Nikles' experiments have been made with large locomotives in full operation; and he states as the result, that the velocity of the wheel's motion does not in any way affect the development of the magnetic force. He finds the condition of the rail, as regards wetness or dryness, to be quite unimportant to the success of his apparatus, and he has already managed by its aid to achieve an ascent as rapid as one in five.

THE STOLEN ROSE.

Geraldine Delisle was the year previous to the late Revolution, which in one day shattered one of the great monarchies of the earth, the reigning belle in her circle. Lovely in form and face, she wanted but to correct some trifling defects of character to be perfect. But if she had large black eyes and massive brow, and beautiful hair and white teeth--if she had a lily-white hand and tiny feet, she knew it too well, and knew the power of her charms over man. She loved admiration, and never was so happy as when in a ball-room all the men were almost disputing for the honor of her hand. But Geraldine had no declared suitor; she never gave the slightest encouragement to any one. Many offered themselves, but they were invariably rejected, until at twenty her parents began to be alarmed at the prospect of her never marrying. M. and Mme Delisle had found so much genuine happiness in marriage--the only natural state for adult human beings--that they had promoted the early marriage of two sons and an elder daughter; and now that Geraldine alone remained, they earnestly desired to see her well and happily married before they died. They received numerous offers: but the young girl had such winning ways with her parents, that when she declared that she did not like the proposer, they never had courage to insist.

During the season of 1847 Geraldine never missed a party or ball. She never tired as long as there was music to listen to, and it was generally very nearly morning before she gained her home. About the middle of the season she was sitting by her mother's side in the splendid _salons_ of the Princess Menzikoff. She had been dancing, and her late partner was saying a few words, to which she scarcely made any reply. Her eyes were fixed upon a gentleman, who, after observing her for some time, had turned away in search of some one. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen in her life, and she was curious to know who he was. A little above the middle height, slight, pale, with great eyes, soft in repose like those of a woman, he had at once interested Geraldine, who, like most women, could excuse every bad feature in a man save insipid or unmeaning eyes; and she asked her mother who he was.

"He's a very bad man," said Mme Delisle. "Of noble family, rich, titled, young, and handsome, he is celebrated only for his follies. He throws away thousands on very questionable pleasures, and has the unpardonable fault, in my eyes of always ridiculing marriage."

"I can not forgive him for ridiculing marriage, mamma, but I can excuse him for not wishing to marry."

"My dear, a man who dislikes marriage is never a good man. A woman may from caprice or from many motives object to marrying, but a man, except when under the influence of hopeless affection--and men have rarely feeling enough for this--always must be a husband to be a good citizen."

"Ah, mamma, you have been so happy that you think all must be so; but you see many who are not."

"Mme Delisle," said the Princess Menzikoff, who unperceived had come round to her, "allow me to introduce you to my friend Alfred de Rougement. I must not call him count, he being what we call a democrat with a clean face and white kid-gloves."

"The princess is always satirical," replied M. de Rougement smiling; "and my harmless opposition to the government now in power, and which she honors with her patronage; is all her ground for so terrible an announcement."

Mme Delisle and Geraldine both started and colored, and when Alfred de Rougement proposed for the next dance, was accepted, though next minute the mother would gladly have found any excuse to have prevented her daughter from dancing. Alfred de Rougement was the very "bad man" whom she had the instant before been denouncing. But it was now too late. From that evening Geraldine never went to a ball without meeting Alfred. She received many invitations from most unexpected quarters, but as surely as she went she found her new admirer, who invited her to dance as often as he could without breaking the rules of etiquette. And yet he rarely spoke; the dance once over, he brought her back to her mother's side, and left her without saying a word, coming back when his turn came again with clockwork regularity. In their drives Mme Delisle and Geraldine were always sure to meet him. Scarcely was the carriage rolling up the Champs Elysees before he was on horseback within sight. He merely bowed as he passed, however, keeping constantly in sight without endeavoring to join them.

One evening, though invited to an early soiree and to a late ball, during dinner they changed their mind, and decided on going to the Opera at the very opening, to hear some favorite music which Geraldine very much admired. They had not yet risen from dessert when a note came from Alfred de Rougement, offering them his box, one of the best in the house!

"Why he is a regular Monte Christo," cried Mme Delisle impatiently. "How can he know our movements so well?"

"He must have bribed some one of the servants," replied Geraldine; "we talked just now of where we were going before they left the room."

"But what does he mean?" said Mme Delisle. "Is he going to give up his enmity to marriage, and propose for you!"

"I don't know, mamma," exclaimed the daughter, coloring very much; "but he may spare himself the trouble."

"Geraldine--Geraldine! you will always then make me unhappy!" said her mother, shaking her head.

"But you can not want me to marry Alfred? You told me every thing against him yourself."

"But if he is going to marry and be steady, I owe him an apology. But go and dress; you want to hear the overture."

They went to Alfred's box--father, mother, and daughter. But though in the house, he scarcely came near them. He came in to inquire after their health, claimed Geraldine's hand for the opening quadrille at the soiree to which they were going after the opera, and went away. The young girl rather haughtily accepted his offer, and then turned round to attend to the music and singing.

Next day, to the astonishment of both M. and Mme Delisle, Alfred de Rougement proposed for the hand of their daughter, expressing the warmest admiration for her, and declaring with earnestness that the happiness of his whole life depended on her decision. Geraldine was referred to. She at once refused him, giving no reason, but expressing regret that she could not share his sentiments. The young man cast one look of reproach at her, rose, and went away without a word. When he was gone she explained to her parents, that though in time she thought she should have liked him, she did not admire his mode of paying his addresses; she thought he ought to have spoken to her first. Mme Delisle replied, that she now very much admired him, and liked his straightforward manner; but Geraldine stopped the conversation by reminding her that he was rejected, and that all discussion was now useless.

That evening Geraldine danced several times with her cousin Edouard Delisle, a young man who for a whole year had paid his addresses to her. They were at a house in the Faubourg St. Germain, where the ball-room opened into a splendid conservatory. Geraldine was dressed in white, with one beautiful rose in her hair, its only ornament. Edouard had been dancing with her, and now sat down by her side. They had never been so completely alone. They occupied a corner near the end, with a dense mass of trees behind them and a tapestry door. Edouard once again spoke of his love and passion, vowed that if she would not consent to be his he should never be happy; all this in a tone which showed how fully he expected to be again refused.

"If you can get mamma's consent, Edouard," she replied quickly, "I am not unwilling to be your wife."

Edouard rose from his seat and stood before her the picture of astonishment. Geraldine rose at the same time.

"But where is your rose?" said the young man, still scarcely able to speak with surprise.

"It is gone--cut away with a knife!" replied she thoughtfully; "but never mind; let us look for mamma."

Edouard took her arm, and in a few minutes the whole family were united. The young man drew his uncle away from a card-table, saying that Geraldine wished to go home. After handing his aunt and cousin to their carriage, he got in after them, quite an unusual thing for him.

"Why, Edouard, you are going out of your way," said the father.

"I know it. But I can not wait until to-morrow. M. Delisle, will you give me your daughter's hand? Geraldine has given her consent."

"My dear girl," exclaimed her mother, "why did you not tell us this before? You would have saved us so much pain, and your other suitors the humiliation of being rejected."

"I did not make up my mind until this evening," replied Geraldine. "I do not think I should have accepted him to-morrow. But he was cunning enough to come and propose before I had time for reflection."

"You will then authorize me to accept him?" said M. Delisle.

"I have accepted him, papa," replied Geraldine.

That evening Edouard entered the house with them, and sat talking for some time. When he went away, he had succeeded in having the wedding fixed for that day-month. Geraldine looked pale the next day; and when her mamma noticed it, said that she should go to no more parties, as she wished to look well the day she was married, and expressed a wish to go on excursions into the country instead. Mme Delisle freely acquiesced, Edouard came to dinner, looking much pleased, but still under the influence of the astonishment which had not yet been effaced from his plump and rosy face.

"Why, what do you think?" he said toward the end of the dinner, "Alfred de Rougement has left Paris. All his servants were dismissed this morning, and his steward received orders to meet him at Constantinople."

"Indeed?" replied Mme Delisle, gravely, while Geraldine turned deadly pale. "But this room is too close for you, my child."

"No, mamma," said she, quietly; "but we are forgetting all about our excursions. I should like to go to Versailles to-morrow, and take all the pretty places round Paris in turn."

"_Bon!_" cried Edouard; "that suits me. I shall be with you early, for I suppose you will go in the morning?"

"I want to breakfast at Versailles," replied Geraldine; "so we must go to bed early."

"That I vote to be an admirable proposition. At eleven I will go. But you are going to practice the new variations on _Pastoris_, are you not?"

"Yes; and you are going to sing, monsieur," said Geraldine, rising from table. "So come along, and ma and papa can play trictrac all the time."

That evening the cousins played and sang together until about ten, when they took tea, which Edouard, good-natured fellow, pretended to like prodigiously, drinking three cups of milk and water under the serious impression that it was the genuine infusion--a practice very common in France, where tea is looked on as dangerous to the nerves. Next day they went to Versailles, breakfasted at the Hotel de France, visited the interminable galleries of pictures, and dined in Paris at a late hour. The day after they went to Montmorency.

Swiftly passed the hours, and days, and weeks, and soon Geraldine saw the last day which was to be her own. In twenty-four hours she was to leave her mother's home forever, to share that of a man to whom it must be supposed she was very much attached, but who was not exactly the companion suited to her. Geraldine was very grave that morning. It had been arranged that they were to go to St. Germain; and though the sky was a little dark, the young girl insisted on the excursion not being put off.

"This is the last day I shall have any will of my own," said she; "so let me exercise it."

"My dear Geraldine," replied her cousin, kindly, "you will always find me ready to yield to you in every thing. I shall be a model husband, for I am too lazy to oppose any one."

"My dear Edouard," put in Mme Delisle, "a man who consults his wife's happiness will always be happy himself. We are very easily pleased when we see you try to please us. The will is every thing to us."

"Then let us start," said Edouard, laughing, "it will pass the time, and I am eager to try."

They entered the open carriage which they usually used for their excursions, and started, the sun now shining very brightly. Edouard was full of spirits: he seemed bursting with happiness, and was forced to speak incessantly to give it vent. Geraldine was very grave, though she smiled at her cousin's sallies, and every now and then answered in her own playful, witty way. The parents, though happy, were serious too. They were about to lose their last child, and though they knew she would be always near them, a feeling of involuntary loneliness came over them. A marriage-day is always for affectionate parents a day of sorrowful pleasure--a link in the chain of sacrifices which makes a parent's love so beautiful and holy, so like what we can faintly trace in thought as the love of the Creator for man.

They took the road by Bongiral, and they were about a mile distant from that place when suddenly they found themselves caught in a heavy shower. The coachman drove hastily for shelter into the midst of a grove of trees, which led up to a villa that appeared totally uninhabited. But it was not so; for the _porte cochere_ flew wide open as they drew up, and two servants advancing, requested them to take shelter in the house.

"But we are intruding?" said Mme Delisle.

"No, madame. Our master is out, but had he been at home he would insist as we do."

Edouard leaped out, and set the example of compliance. The whole party followed the servants, who led the way into a splendidly-furnished suite of rooms. The style was that of the _renaissance_, of the richest materials, while the walls were covered with genuine paintings by the first masters. The servants then left them, and they were heard next minute assisting to take the horses from the carriage. The rain fell heavily all the time.

"Upon my word we are very fortunate," said Mme Delisle: "in ten minutes we should have been soaked through. The master of the house must be some very noble-minded man; no ordinary person would have such polite and attentive servants."

"Some eccentric foreigner," said Edouard: "all his servants are men; I don't see the sign of a petticoat any where."

"Some woman-hater, perhaps," said Geraldine, laughing, as she took from the table before her a celebrated satire against the sex.

"All the more polite of him," said Mme Delisle, while looking with absolute horror at a book which she knew spoke irreverently of marriage.

"If you will pass this way," said a servant entering, "we shall have the honor to offer you breakfast. The rain has set in for some hours, and your servants spoke of your wishing to breakfast at St. Germain. But you will not be able to wait so long."

The whole party looked unfeignedly surprised; but there was no resisting a servant who spoke so politely, and who threw open a door whence they discovered a table magnificently laid out. Several servants were ready to wait.

"_Ma foi!_" cried Edouard, "there is no resisting such temptation. You seem to know your master's character, and we take your word for it that he would make us welcome."

With these words he gave Geraldine his arm, and led the way, setting the example also of attacking the delicate viands offered to them so unexpectedly. All breakfasted with appetite after their ride, and then returned to the room they had first occupied. The shower was over, and the warm sun was quickly clearing away all sign of the rain.

"What a beautiful house and grounds your master has here!" exclaimed Edouard: "the garden appears to me even better than the house."

"It is very beautiful," said the servant addressed.

"Can we go over it?" continued the young man.

"Certainly, monsieur: I was about to offer to show it you."

"I shall remain here," said Geraldine; "my shoes are very thin; besides I wish to have another look at the pictures."

Edouard demurred, but the young girl bade him go at once; and, like an obedient lover, he took the mamma's arm, and went into the garden.

The instant all were gone Geraldine rose from her chair and tottered across the room. She was pale, and looked cautiously round, as if about to do some guilty act. Presently she stood before a curtain which had been hastily drawn before a kind of niche in the wall, or rather before a portion of the room. But it had been done very quickly, and through two apartures you could see stained glass, and on a small table something under a glass-case. Geraldine could not restrain herself. She pulled away the curtain, and there, under a large glass on a velvet cushion, lay the rose which had been cut from her head-dress on the night she had accepted the hand of her cousin. Near it was a pencil-sketch of herself.

"My God!" she cried, passionately, "he did love me then: what a fool I have been! Wicked pride, to what will you lead me?"

"My Geraldine," exclaimed Alfred, who rose from a chair where he had been seated in a dark corner, "pardon me! But I could not resist the temptation. To see, to hear you once more, for the last time, was my only wish. Do you forgive me?"

"Do you forgive _me_?" said Geraldine, hanging down her head, and speaking in a low, soft, sweet voice, that had never been hers before.

"My God!--what?" exclaimed Alfred, who, pale and trembling, stood by her side.

"You will not force me to say, Alfred," she continued in a beseeching tone.

"Do I understand aright? O forgive me, Geraldine, if I say too much; but is it possible that you do not hate me?"

"Hate you, Alfred! How can I hate one so generous and good? If you think me not bold to say it, I will say I love you. After behaving as I did, that confession will be my punishment."

"My Geraldine! then why did you refuse me?" cried Alfred, in a tone of passionate delight.

"Because you did not seem to love me; because you only in my eyes sought to marry me because others did."

"Geraldine, I seemed cold because I loved you with all my heart and soul. But I was a known satirist on marriage, and I was ashamed to let the world see my deep affection. I wanted them to think that I married merely because it was a triumph to carry off the reigning belle."

"You deceived me and all the world together," replied Geraldine; "but to own the truth, after you were gone and took my rose with you, I guessed the truth."

"The rose! but did you know--"

"I guessed--"

"My God!" cried Edouard, returning alone to fetch Geraldine, to whom he wanted to show the garden, "what is the meaning of this?"

"My good cousin," said Geraldine, advancing toward him, and taking both his hands, "come here; you will forgive Geraldine, won't you? I have been very wicked. Do excuse your cousin, will you not? but I was only going to marry you because I thought Alfred did not love me."

"_Hein!_" cried Edouard, quite bewildered.

"Don't be angry with me," continued Geraldine, gravely: "I should have been a very good wife, and have loved you very much had I married you."

"Oh, then, you do not mean to marry me now?" said Edouard, in a tone of deep sadness.

"What am I to do?" cried Geraldine. "See, my dear cousin, how he loved me! How can I marry you when my heart is given to another?"

"You were going to do so, but for a shower of rain," said Edouard, with a vain attempt at gravity. "But take her, M. Alfred: I think after all I'm lucky to have escaped her! I don't forgive you a bit, because it's hard to find out that when at last one thinks one's self loved, the lady was only pretending."

"You do forgive me!" exclaimed Geraldine, shaking her head, and putting his hand into that of Alfred, who shook it warmly.

"Yes, yes!--of course you're pleased! But I must marry now. I shall ask Helene at Bordeaux to have me, as nobody there will know any thing about my present mishap."

At this moment M. and Mme Delisle returned; their astonishment was of course very great. Edouard gravely introduced the young couple.

"You see, madame," he said, "that while you were walking round the garden, I have managed to lose my wife, and you to find a son-in-law."

"But, my Geraldine," exclaimed her mother, "are you not behaving very badly to Edouard?"

"Not at all!" said the young man: "I could not think of marrying her. Look at her! Five minutes with Alfred has done her more good than all her excursions in search of roses!"

"Mischievous man to betray me!" said Geraldine in her turn, warmly shaking his hand.

"But what will the world say?" exclaimed M. Delisle.

"I will tell the truth," said Alfred; and in a few words he explained the cause of the refusal of Geraldine to have him.

It was now settled that the day should be spent at the villa; that in the evening they should return to Paris, without the count, who was to present himself only next day. He agreed to own frankly to all his friends the depth and sincerity of his affection, while Edouard good-naturedly volunteered to tell every one that he had been turned off--a promise which he gravely kept, relating his discomfiture in a way that drew tears of laughter from all his hearers.

And Geraldine and Alfred were married, to the surprise of the world. They were both cured of their former errors, and I know no instance of a happier marriage than that of M. and Mme de Rougement. He is now a member of the Legislative Assembly, and is remarked for the liberality of his opinions--being one of the many ex-legitimists who have gone over to the moderate republican party. Edouard married his country cousin. Both young couples have children, and both are happy: the only revenge the young man having taken is to persevere on all occasions, even before his own wife, in calling Geraldine "The Stolen Rose."

THOMAS MOORE.

Thomas Moore, a man of brilliant gifts and large acquirements, if not an inspired poet, was born on the 28th of May, 1780, in Augier-street, Dublin, where his father carried on a respectable business as a grocer and spirit-dealer. Both his parents were strict Roman Catholics, and he, of course, was educated in the same faith; at that time under the ban not only of penal statutes, but of influential opinion both in Great Britain and Ireland. Thus humble and unpromising were the birth and early prospects of an author who--thanks to the possession of great popular talent, very industriously cultivated and exercised, together with considerable tact and prudence, and pleasing social accomplishments--won for himself not only the general fame which ordinarily attends the successful display of genius, but the especial sympathy and admiration of his countrymen and fellow-religionists, and the smiles and patronage of a large and powerful section of the English aristocracy, at whose tables and in whose drawing-rooms his sparkling wit and melodious patriotism rendered him an ever-welcome guest. Few men, indeed, have passed more pleasantly through the world than Thomas Moore. His day of life was one continual sunshine, just sufficiently tempered and shaded by passing clouds--"mere crumpling of the rose-leaves"--as to soften and enhance its general gayety and brightness. With its evening thick shadows came--the crushing loss of children--and the gray-haired poet, pressed by his heavy grief, has turned in his latter years from the gay vanities of brilliant society, and sought peace and consolation in seclusion, and the zealous observance of the precepts and discipline of the church to which he is, not only from early training and association, but by temperament and turn of mind, devotedly attached.

As a child, Moore was, we are told, remarkable for personal beauty, and might have sat, says a writer not over-friendly to him, "as Cupid for a picture." This early promise was not fulfilled. Sir Walter Scott, speaking of him in 1825, says: "He is a little, very little man--less, I think, than Lewis, whom he resembles: his countenance is plain, but very animated when speaking or singing." The lowness of his stature was a sore subject with Moore--almost as much, and as absurdly so, as the malformation of his foot was with Lord Byron. Leigh Hunt, in a work published between twenty and thirty years ago, gives the following detailed portrait of the Irish poet: "His forehead is bony and full of character, with bumps of wit large and radiant enough to transport a phrenologist; his eyes are as dark and fine as you would wish to see under a set of vine-leaves; his mouth, generous and good-humored, with dimples; 'his nose, sensual and prominent, and at the same time the reverse of aquiline: there is a very peculiar characteristic in it--as if it were looking forward to and scenting a feast or an orchard.' The face, upon the whole, is Irish, not unruffled by care and passion, but festivity is the predominant expression." In Mr. Hunt's autobiography, not long since published, this portrait is repeated, with the exception of the words we have inclosed within single inverted commas--struck out possibly from a lately-awakened sense of their injustice; and it is added that "his (Moore's) manner was as bright as his talk was full of the wish to please and be pleased." To these testimonials as to the personal appearance and manners of Thomas Moore, we can only add that of Mr. Joseph Atkinson, one of the poet's most intimate and attached friends. This gentleman, when speaking to an acquaintance of the author of the "Melodies," said that to him "Moore always seemed an infant sporting on the bosom of Venus." This somewhat perplexing idea of the mature author of the songs under discussion was no doubt suggested by the speaker's recollections of his friend's childhood.

Whatever the personal graces or defects of Mr. Moore, it is quite certain, at all events, that he early exhibited considerable mental power and imitative faculty. He was placed when very young with Mr. Samuel Whyte, who kept a respectable school in Grafton-street, Dublin. This was the Mr. Whyte who attempted to educate Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and pronounced him to be "an incorrigible dunce;" a verdict in which at the time the mother of the future author of the "School for Scandal" fully concurred. Mr. Whyte, it seems, delighted in private theatricals, and his labors in this mode of diffusing entertaining knowledge were, it appears, a good deal patronized by the Dublin aristocracy. Master Moore was his "show-actor," and played frequently at Lady Borrowes's private theatre. On one occasion the printed bills announced "An Epilogue--_A Squeeze at St. Paul's_, by Master Moore," in which he is said to have been very successful. These theatricals were attended by several members of the ducal family of Leinster, the Latouches of Dublin, with many other Irish notabilities; and it was probably here that Moore contracted the taste for aristocratic society which afterward became a passion with him.

The obstinate exclusion of the Catholics from the common rights of citizenship naturally excited violent and growing discontent among that body of religionists; and Thomas Moore's parents, albeit prudent, wary folk, were, like thousands of others naturally sensible and pacific people, carried away for a moment by the tremendous outburst of the French Revolution. The meteor-blaze which suddenly leaped forth and dazzled the astonished world, seemed a light from Heaven to the oppressed nations of Europe; and in Ireland, especially, it was hailed as the dawn of a great deliverance by millions whom an unwise legislation had alienated and almost maddened. Young Moore, when little more than twelve years of age, sat upon his father's knee at a great banquet in Dublin, where the toast--"May the breezes from France fan our Irish oak into verdure!" was received with a frantic vehemence which, child as he was, left an impression upon him that did not pass away with many years. The Day-star of Liberty, as it was termed, which arose in France, set in blood and tempest; but the government, alarmed at the ominous aspect of the times, relaxed (1793) the penal laws, and Catholics, for the first time, were eligible for admission to the Dublin University: eligible--that is, to partake of the instruction conferred at the national seat of learning, but not for its honors or rewards. These were still jealously reserved for the dominant caste. Young Moore was immediately entered of Trinity College; and although he succeeded by his assiduity and ability in extorting an acknowledgment from the authorities that he had earned a classical degree, he was, for religion's sake, as a matter of course, denied it. Some English verses, however, which he presented at one of the quarterly examinations in lieu of the usual Latin metre, were extolled; and he received a well-bound copy of the "Travels of Anarchasis" as a reward. The young student's proficiency in the Greek and Latin languages was also acknowledged, though not officially.

For several previous years the thunder-cloud which burst so fatally in 1798, had been slowly gathering in Ireland. Moore sympathized with the object, if not with the mode of operation contemplated by the opponents of English rule in that country; and he appears to have been only saved from serious if not fatal implication in the rebellion by the wise admonitions of his excellent mother, aided by his own instinctive aversion to the committal of any act which might compromise his present and future position, by placing him among extreme men in the front and forlorn hope of the battle, instead of amid the wiser respectabilities of liberalism, from whose ranks a man of wit and genius may, he knew, shoot his diamond-tipt arrows at the enemy not only without danger, but with almost certain fame and profit to himself. Moore was intimate with the two Emmets, and an active member of a debating-club, in which the eldest, the unfortunate Robert, endeavored to mature his oratorical powers against the time when his dream of political regeneration should be realized. Toward the close of the year 1797, the, at the time, celebrated newspaper called "The Press," was started by Arthur O'Connor, the Emmets, and other chiefs of the United Irishmen. It was published twice a week, and although, Mr. Moore says, not distinguished at all for talent, had a large circulation among the excited masses. Moore first contributed a poetical effusion--anonymously of course--and soon growing bolder with impunity, contributed a fiery letter, which had the questionable honor of being afterward quoted in the House of Commons by the minister as one of his proofs that severe repressive measures were required to put down the dangerous spirit manifested in Ireland. On the evening this letter appeared, young Moore read it after supper to the assembled family--his heart beating violently all the while lest the sentiments it contained, and the style in which they were expressed, should reveal the eloquent author. His fears were groundless; no one suspected him; and the only remark elicited by the violent letter was a quiet one from his sister--"that it was rather strong!" Next day his mother, through the indiscretion of a person connected with the newspaper, discovered his secret, and commanded him, as he valued her blessing, to disconnect himself at once from so dangerous a pursuit and companionship. The young man obeyed, and the storm of 1798 passed over harmlessly for him. Moore was once slightly questioned upon the subject of the apprehended conspiracy by Lord Chancellor Clare, who insisted upon compelling a disclosure, upon oath, of any knowledge the students of the university might possess of the persons and plans of the plotters. Moore at first declined being sworn, alleging in excuse that he had never taken an oath, and although perfectly unconscious himself of offense against the government, that he might unwittingly compromise others. This odd excuse Lord Clare, after consulting with Duigenan, famous for his anti-papist polemics, declined to receive, and Moore was sworn. Three or four questions were asked as to his knowledge of any conspiracy to overthrow the government, by violence; and these briefly answered, the matter ended. This is Mr. Moore's own version of a scene which has been rendered in various amusing and exaggerated forms.

The precocity of Moore's rhyming genius had been also exemplified by a sonnet, written when he was only fourteen years of age, and inserted in a Dublin magazine called "The Anthologia." Two or three years later he composed a Masque, which was performed by himself, his elder sister, and some young friends, in the little drawing-room over the shop in Augier-street, a friend, afterward a celebrated musician, enacting orchestra on the piano-forte. One of the songs of the masque was written to the air of Haydn's Spirit Song, and obtained great applause. Master Moore belonged, moreover, to a band of gay spirits who occasionally amused themselves by a visit to Dalkey, a small island in the Bay of Dublin, electing one Stephen Armitage, a respectable pawnbroker, and "very agreeable singer," King of that Ilk. On one of these coronation days King Stephen conferred the honor of knighthood upon Incledon, with the title of Sir Charles Melody; and he created Miss Battier, a rhyming lady, Henrietta, Countess of Laurel, and His Majesty's Poetess-Laureate. The working laureate was, however, Master Moore, and in that capacity he first tried his hand at political squibbing, by launching some not very brilliant sarcasms against governments in general. Lord Clare, we are told, was half alarmed at this Dalkey court and its poets, and insisted upon an explanation from one of the mock officials. This is, however, we believe, a fable, though at the time a current one.

In 1799, being then only in his twentieth year, Thomas Moore arrived in London, for the purpose of entering himself of the Middle Temple, and publishing his translation of the Odes of Anacreon. He had already obtained the friendship of Earl Moira, and that nobleman procured him permission to dedicate the work to the Prince of Wales. His poetical career may now be said to have fairly commenced. It was a long and brilliant one, most of his works having rapidly passed through numerous editions, and been, perhaps, more extensively read than those of any contemporary author, always excepting the romances of Scott. There can be no reasonable doubt that Moore owed much of this popularity and success to the accident of his position, and the favoring circumstances of the times in which he wrote. The _enfant gate_ of high and influential circles; as well as the melodious expositor and poet-champion of the wrongs of a nation to whose glorious music he has, happily for himself, married much of his sweetest verse, he dwelt in a peculiar and irradiating atmosphere, which greatly enhanced his real magnitude and brightness. Even now, when the deceptive medium has lost its influence, it is somewhat difficult, and may seem ungracious, to assign his true place in the splendid galaxy of British poets to a writer who has contributed so largely to the delight of the reading and musical population of these kingdoms.

The Odes of Anacreon obtained much present popularity at a time when the moralities of respectable literature were not so strictly enforced by public opinion as in the present day. Many of them are paraphrases rather than translations, containing, as Dr. Laurence, Burke's friend, remarked at the time, "pretty turns not to be found in Anacreon."

"Thomas Little's Poems, Songs," &c., given to the world by Mr. Moore in 1801, are a collection of puerile rhapsodies still more objectionable than the Anacreontic Odes: and the only excuse for them was the extreme youth of the writer. Byron thus alluded to the book in his once famous satire:

"'Tis Little, young Catullus of his day, As sweet but as immoral in his lay."

Many years afterward his lordship, in a letter to Moore (1820), reverted, half in jest, half in earnest, to the work in these words, "I believe all the mischief I have ever done or sung has been owing to that confounded book of yours." The most objectionable of these songs have been omitted from the recent editions of Moore's works, and we believe no one has more deplored their original publication than the author himself.

In 1803, thanks to his verses and Lord Moira's patronage, Moore obtained a place under the government--that of Registrar to the Court of Admiralty at Bermuda. Moore sailed in the _Phoenix_ frigate, and took formal possession of his post; but he soon wearied of the social monotony of the "still vexed Bermoothes," hastily appointed a deputy to perform all the duties of his office for a share of the income, and betook himself to America. He was as much out of his proper element there as in Bermuda. The rugged republicanism of the States disgusted him, and after a brief glance at Canada he returned to England, having been absent about fifteen months.

Soon after his return he favored the world with his impressions of Bermuda, the United States, and Canada. His sketches of Bermudan scenery have been pronounced by Captain Basil Hall and others to be extremely accurate and vivid. On the truthfulness of his American social and political pictures and prophecies, Time--a much higher authority--has unmistakably delivered judgment. While in Canada, Mr. Moore composed the popular "Boat-song," the words and air of which were, he says, inspired by the scenery and circumstances which the verses portray, and by the measured chant of the Canadian rowers. Captain Hall also testifies to the fidelity of this descriptive song.

The republication in 1806 of Juvenile Songs, Odes, &c., elicited a fierce and contemptuous denunciation of them from the Edinburgh Review, and this led to a hostile meeting between the editor of that publication, the late Lord Jeffrey, and Mr. Moore. They met at Chalk Farm, near Hampstead; but the progress of the duel was interrupted by police officers, who, on examining the pistols of the baffled combatants, found that they had been charged with powder only. This was probably a sensible device--it was not at all an uncommon one--on the part of the seconds to prevent mischief; or, it might have been, as is usually believed, that the bullets dropped out of one or both of the pistols by the jolting of the carriages in which the combatants reached the field of expected battle; but of course the discovery created a great laugh at the time. Moore indignantly denied through the newspapers that he was cognizant of the innocent state of Mr. Jeffrey's pistol--an assertion there can not be the slightest reason for doubting. This droll incident led to his subsequent acquaintance with Lord Byron, who, unmindful or regardless of Mr. Moore's denial of the "calumny," repeated it with variations in his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," chiefly with a view to annoy Mr. Jeffrey. Moore was again indignant, and demanded an apology or satisfaction. His letter did not, however, reach the noble lord till many months afterward, when _explanations_ ensued, and the affair terminated by a dinner at the house of Mr. Rogers, where the four poets, Byron, Campbell, Moore, and Rogers, met each other for the first time.

The intimacy thus commenced, if we may judge from the biography of Byron, ripened into a lasting friendship on the part of Moore. This feeling was but faintly reciprocated by Byron. Indeed, if we are to believe his own statement, made in one of his latest letters, the noble poet was almost incapable of friendship, "never having," he says, "except toward Lord Clare, whom he had known from infancy, and perhaps little Moore," experienced any such emotion. "Little Tommy dearly loves a lord," was Byron's sneering expression more than once; and perhaps he believed Moore's loudly-expressed regard for himself to be chiefly based on that predilection.

Moore had before this married a Miss Dyke, who is described as a lady of great beauty and amiability, and moreover distinguished for considerable decision of character and strong common sense--qualities which more than once proved of essential service to her husband. They had several children, the loss of whom, as we have before stated, has darkened and embittered the close of the poet's days.

In 1811, Moore made a first and last appearance before the world as a dramatist, by the production at the Lyceum theatre of an operatic piece called "An M.P.; or, The Blue Stocking." It was emphatically damned, notwithstanding two or three pleasing songs, which somewhat redeemed its dull and vapid impertinence. The very pretty song of "Young Love lived once in an humble shed," occurs in this piece. Moore's acquaintance with Leigh Hunt dates from the acting of the "Blue Stocking." Mr. Hunt was at the time editor of the "Examiner" newspaper, in which he had just before paid some compliments to Moore's poetry; and the nervous dramatist, naturally anxious to propitiate a critic whose opinion was esteemed oracular in certain circles, wrote him a rather fulsome letter, in which he set forth, as an _ad misericordiam_ plea for lenient judgment, that he had rashly been induced to promise Arnold a piece for his theatre, in consequence of the state of attenuation to which the purses of poets are proverbially liable. The "M.P." was, as we have said, condemned, and Esop's disappointed fox received another illustration. "Writing bad jokes," quoth Mr. Moore, "for the Lyceum to make the galleries laugh is in itself sufficiently degrading; but to try to make them laugh, and fail to do so, is indeed deplorable." In sooth, to make "galleries" either laugh or weep was never Mr. Moore's aim or vocation. His eye was ever fixed upon the gay company of the "boxes," occasionally only glancing apprehensively aside from its flattering homage to scan the faces of the sour critics of the pit. And yet to make the galleries of the theatre and the world laugh has tasked and evidenced wit and humor, in comparison with which the gayest sallies, the most sparkling of Mr. Moore's fancies, are vapidity itself. The mortified dramatist gave up play-writing forever, or, as he contemptuously expressed it, "made a hearty abjuration of the stage and all its heresies of pun, equivoque, and clap-trap." He was wise in doing so. The discretion evinced by the hasty retreat was only exceeded by the rashness of the venture.

The intimacy of Thomas Moore and Leigh Hunt continued for some years. Moore, in company with Lord Byron, dined once or twice with Hunt in prison during his confinement for a pretended libel upon the regent. A pertinent anecdote, throwing some light on Byron's sneer respecting Moore's love of lords, is told of one of these visits. The three friends, Byron, Moore, and Hunt, were walking before dinner in the prison garden, when a shower of rain came on, and Moore ran into the house, and upstairs, leaving his companions to follow as they best might. Consciousness of the discourtesy of such behavior toward his noble companion quickly flashed upon him, and he was overwhelmed with confusion. Mr. Hunt tried to console him. "I quite forgot at the moment," said Moore, "whom I was walking with; but I was forced to remember it by his not coming up. I could not in decency go on, and to return was awkward." This anxiety--on account of Byron's lameness--Mr. Hunt remarks, appeared to him very amiable.

This friendship came to an abrupt and unpleasant close. Lord Byron agreed with Hunt and Shelley to start a new periodical, to be called "The Liberal," the profits of which were to go to Leigh Hunt. Byron's parody on Southey's "Vision of Judgment" appeared in it, and ultimately William Hazlitt became a contributor. Moore immediately became alarmed for his noble friend's character, which he thought would be compromised by his connection with Hunt and Hazlitt, and wrote to entreat him to withdraw himself from a work which had "a taint in it," and from association with men upon whom society "had set a mark." His prayer was complied with, and the two last-named gentlemen were very angry, as well they might be. There has been a good deal of crimination and recrimination between the parties on the subject, not at all worth reproducing. The truth is that both Hunt and Hazlitt, but especially the latter, were at the time under the ban of influential society and a then powerful Tory press; and Moore, with his usual prudence, declining to be mad-dog'd in their company and for their sakes, deliberately _cut_ two such extreme Radicals, and induced his noble friend to do likewise. How could a prudent man who had given hostages to fortune, which Moore by this time had, in a wife and children, act otherwise?

Moore had long cherished a hope of allying his poetry with the expressive music of Ireland; of giving appropriate vocal utterance to the strains which had broken fitfully from out the tumults and tramplings of centuries of unblest rule. A noble task! in which even partial success demands great powers and deserves high praise. The execution of the long-meditated design now commenced; and the "Melodies," as they appeared, obtained immense and well-deserved popularity. It is upon these his fame, as a poet, will mainly rest; and no one can deny that, as a whole, they exhibit great felicity of expression, and much graceful tenderness of thought and feeling, frequently relieved by flashes of gay and genial wit and humor. No one could be more keenly aware, or could more gracefully acknowledge than Moore the great help to a poet's present reputation of connecting his verse with national or local associations.

In 1812 Moore determined on writing an Eastern tale in verse; and his friend Mr. Perry of the "Chronicle" accompanied him to Messrs. Longman, the publishers, to arrange for the sale of a work of which the proposed author had not yet written a line nor even settled the subject. Mr. Perry appears to have been an invaluable intermediary. He proposed at once, as the basis of the negotiation, that Moore should have the largest sum ever given for such a work. "That," observed the Messrs. Longman, "was three thousand guineas." And three thousand guineas it was ultimately covenanted the price should be, thanks to Moore's reputation, and the business abilities of his friend Perry. It was further agreed that the manuscript should be furnished at whatever time might best suit the author's convenience, and that Messrs. Longman should accept it for better for worse, and have no power or right to suggest alterations or changes of any kind. The bargain was altogether a safe one on Moore's side, and luckily it turned out equally profitable for the publishers.

In order to obtain the necessary leisure and quiet for the composition of such a work, Moore resolved to retire from the gayeties of Holland and Lansdowne Houses, and other mansions of his distinguished patrons and friends, to the seclusion and tranquillity of the country. He made choice of Mayfield Cottage, near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, and not far distant from Donnington Park, Lord Moira's country-seat, where an excellent library was at his service. It may be as well to mention that when this early and influential friend of Moore went out to India as governor-general, he apologized for not being able to present his poetical protege with any thing worth his acceptance in that country. "But," said Lord Moira (Marquis of Hastings), "I can perhaps barter a piece of India patronage against something at home that might suit you." This offer, which would have gravely compromised Moore with his Whig friends, he with some asperity declined. The governor-general went to India, and Moore retired to Derbyshire, remaining, with the exception of his Bermudan registrarship, placeless. This offer and refusal Moore communicated by letter to Leigh Hunt.

Mayfield Cottage, when the poet and his wife arrived to view it, wore any thing but an inviting aspect. "It was a poor place," Moore wrote, "little better than a barn; but we at once took it, and set about making it habitable and comfortable." He now commenced the formidable task of working himself up into a proper Oriental state of mind for the accomplishment of his work. The first part of this process consisted in reading every work of authority that treated of the topography, climate, zoology, ornithology, entomology, floriculture, horticulture, agriculture, manners, customs, religion, ceremonies, and languages of the East. Asiatic registers, D'Herbelot, Jones, Tavernier, Flemming, and a host of other writers were industriously consulted; and so perfect did Mr. Moore become in these various branches of knowledge, that a great Eastern traveler, after reading "Lalla Rookh," and being assured that the poet had never visited the scenes in which he placed his stories, remarked that if it were so, a man might learn as much of those countries by reading books as by riding on the back of a camel! This, however, was but a part of the requisite preparation. "I am," says Mr. Moore, "a slow, painstaking workman, and at once very imaginative and very matter-of-fact;" and he goes on to say that the slightest exterior interruption or contradiction to the imaginary state of things he was endeavoring to conjure up in his brain threw all his ideas into confusion and disarray. It was necessary, therefore, to surround himself in some way or other with an Eastern atmosphere. How this could be managed in the face of the snows of the Derbyshire winters, during which the four stories which compose "Lalla Rookh" were written, it is difficult to conceive, and perhaps to the fact that it could _not_ be effectually done, must be ascribed the ill success which beset the poet during an entire twelvemonth. Vainly did he string together peris and bulbuls, and sunny apples of Totkahar: the inspiration would _not_ come. It was all "Double, double, toil and trouble," to no purpose. Each story, however trippingly it began, soon flagged, drooped, and, less fortunate than that of

----"The bear and fiddle, Begun and broke off in the middle,"

expired of collapse after a brief career of a few score lines only, frequently nothing like so many. Some of these fragments have since been published. One of them, "The Peri's Daughter," ran to some length, and is rather pretty and sparkling.

This uninspiring state of things seemed interminable--the three thousand guineas were as far off as ever; and apprehension of the necessity of a bodily journey to the East, in order to get at the genuine "atmosphere," must have suggested itself, when a gleam of light, in the idea of the "Fire-Worshipers," broke in upon the poet; the multifarious collection of Eastern materials deposited in the chambers of his brain arranged themselves in flowing numbers, without encountering any further accident; and at the end of three years "Lalla Rookh" was ushered before an admiring world. Its success was immense, and the work ran rapidly through many editions. "Paradise and the Peri," the second story, although not so much praised as the first and third, is, we fancy, much the most read of the four; and from its light, ringing tone, its delicate and tender sentiment, its graceful and musical flow, will always be a principal favorite with the admirers of Thomas Moore's poetry.

The bow so long bent required relaxation, and in the first flush of his great success, while his ears were still ringing with the applauses, and his nostrils still titillating with the incense which the press showered upon "Lalla Rookh," pronounced by general consent--"when they _do_ agree, their unanimity is wonderful"--to be unrivaled as a work of melody, beauty, and power, Moore set out on a continental tour with his friend and brother-poet Rogers. On his return to England he published the "Fudge Family"--not a very brilliant performance, and which, with the exception of its political hits, is but an imitation of "Les Anglaises Pour Rire." He also worked at the "Melodies," and wrote articles for the "Edinburgh Review." In 1818 one of the most pleasing incidents in his life occurred. A public dinner was given in his honor at Dublin, the Earl of Charlemont in the chair--the poet's venerable father, Garret Moore, being present on the chairman's right hand, the honored and delighted witness of the enthusiastic welcome bestowed upon his son by his warm-hearted fellow-countrymen. Moore made a graceful, cleverly-turned speech; but he was no orator: few literary men are. He could not think upon his legs; and you could see by the abstraction of his look that he was not speaking, in the popular sense, but reciting what had previously been carefully composed and committed to memory. Such speeches frequently read well, but if long, they are terrible things to sit and hear.

The following year Moore accompanied Lord John Russell on a continental tour, taking the road of the Simplon to Italy. Lord John went on to Genoa, and Moore directed his steps toward Venice, for the purpose of seeing Byron. It was during this visit the noble lord made Moore a present of his personal memoirs, for publication after the writer's death. Moore gives the following account of the transaction: "We were conversing together when Byron rose and went out. In a minute or two he returned carrying a white leathern bag. 'Look here!' he said, holding it up, 'this would be worth something to Murray, though you, I daresay, would not give sixpence for it.' 'What is it?' I asked, 'My life and adventures,' he answered. On hearing this I raised my hands in a gesture. 'It is not a thing that can be published during my life, but you may have it if you like: then do whatever you please with it.' In taking the bag, and thanking him most warmly, I added: 'This will make a nice legacy for my little Tom, who shall astonish the latter end of the nineteenth century with it.' He then added: 'You may show it to any of your friends you think worthy of it.' This is as nearly as I can recollect all that passed." These memoirs Moore sold to Murray for two thousand guineas, but at Lord Byron's death, his executors and family induced Moore to repay Mr. Murray and destroy the manuscript. The precise reasons which decided Moore to yield to the solicitations of the deceased lord's friends and family are not known, but there can be little doubt that they were urgent, and in a moral sense irresistible. A man does not usually throw away two thousand guineas for a caprice, even of his own, much less for that of others. It is not likely that the world has lost much by the destruction of these memoirs. Lord Byron's life is sufficiently written in his published works for all purposes save that of the gratification of a morbid curiosity and vulgar appetite for scandal.

During the journey to and from Italy, Moore sketched the "Rhymes on the Road," which were soon afterward published. There is nothing remarkable about them except his abuse of Rousseau and Madame Warens, _a propos_ of a visit to Les Charmettes. Moore was violently assailed for this by writers, who held that as he had himself translated Anacreon, and written juvenile songs of an immoral tendency, he was thereby incapacitated from fy, fying naughty people in his maturer and better years. This seems hardly a reasonable maxim, and would, if strictly interpreted and enforced, silence much grave and learned eloquence, oral as well as written. His denunciations of the eccentric and fanciful author of the "Confessions," which twenty years before he would probably have called the enunciations of "Virtue with her zone loosened;" were certainly violent and unmeasured, and not, perhaps, in the very best taste.

Pecuniary difficulties, arising from the misconduct of his deputy in Bermuda, now threatened Mr. Moore, and flight to France--for process against him had issued from the Court of Admiralty--became immediately necessary. The deputy-registrar, from whom Mr. Moore had exacted no securities, had made free with the cargoes of several American vessels, and immediately decamped with the proceeds, leaving his principal liable, it was feared, to the serious amount of six thousand pounds. Active and successful efforts were, however, made by Moore's friends to compromise the claims, and ultimately they were all adjusted by the payment of one thousand guineas. Three hundred pounds toward this sum were contributed by the delinquent's uncle, a London merchant; so that Moore's ultimate loss was seven hundred and fifty pounds only. During the progress, and at the close of these negotiations, numerous offers of pecuniary assistance were addressed to Mr. Moore, all of which he gratefully but firmly declined.

While the matter was pending, Moore resided near Paris at La Butte Coaslin, on the road to Belle Vue. This was also the residence of some agreeable Spanish friends of the poet. Kenny the dramatic writer lived also in the neighborhood. Here Moore composed his "Loves of the Angels," passing his days, when they were fine, in walking up and down the park of Saint Cloud, "polishing verses and making them run easy," and the evenings in singing Italian duets with his Spanish friends. Previous to leaving Paris, at the close of 1822, he attended a banquet got up in his honor by many of the most distinguished and wealthy of the English residents in that gay city. His speech on this occasion was a high-flown panegyric upon England and every thing English, and grievously astonished Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and others, when they read it in Italy. Either they thought the tone of some of the Irish melodies was wrong, or the speech was. They did not reflect that a judicious speaker always adapts his speech to his audience. Apt words in apt places are the essentials of true eloquence.

Moore's publishers' account, delivered in the following June, exhibited a very pleasing aspect. He was credited with one thousand pounds for the "Loves of the Angels," and five hundred pounds for "Fables for the Holy Alliance." These were the halcyon days of poetry. There was truth as well as mirthful jest in Sir Walter Scott's remark a few years afterward, in reply to Moore's observation, "that hardly a magazine is now published but contains verses which would once have made a reputation." "Ecod!" exclaimed the baronet, "we were very lucky to come before these fellows!"

In 1825 Moore paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott at Abbottsford. The meeting was a cordial one, and the baronet, Mr. Lockhart informs us, pronounced Mr. Moore "to be the prettiest warbler" he ever knew. What somewhat diminishes the value of this praise is, that, according to the warbler himself, Sir Walter--but the thing seems incredible--had no genuine love or taste for music, except indeed for the Jacobite chorus of "Hey tuttie, tattie," now indissolubly united to "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled!" which, when sung after supper by the company, with hands clasped across each other, and waving up and down, he hugely delighted in. Scott accompanied Moore to Edinburgh, and both of them, with Mr. Lockhart and his lady, went to the theatre on the same evening that it was honored by the presence of the celebrated Mrs. Coutts, afterward Duchess of St. Albans. Soon after their at first unmarked entrance, the attention of the audience which had till then been engrossed by the lady millionaire, was directed toward the new-comers, and according to a newspaper report, copied and published by Mr. Moore, in one of his last prefaces, considerable excitement immediately prevailed. "Eh!" exclaimed a man in the pit--"eh! yon's Sir Walter, wi' Lockhart and his wife: and wha's the wee body wi' the pawkie een? Wow, but it's Tam Moore just!" "Scott--Scott! Moore--Moore!" immediately resounded through the house. Scott would not rise: Moore did, and bowed several times with his hand on his heart. Scott afterward acknowledged the plaudits of his countrymen, and the orchestra, during the rest of the evening, played alternately Scotch and Irish airs.

At the request of the Marquis of Lansdowne, who was desirous that he should reside near him, Moore at this period took a journey into Wiltshire, to look at a house in the village of Bromham, near Bowood, the seat of the noble marquis, which it was thought might suit him. He, however, pronounced it to be too large, and declined taking it. On his return he told his wife there was a cottage in a thickly-wooded lane in the neighborhood to let, which he thought might be made to do. Mrs. Moore immediately left town, secured it, and there they shortly afterward took up their permanent abode. They have greatly improved and enlarged Sloperton Cottage; and covered almost as its front and two porches are with roses and clematis, with the trim miniature lawn and garden in front, along which runs a raised walk inclosed with evergreens, from which a fine view is obtained, it presents an entirely satisfactory aspect of well-ordered neatness, prettiness, and comfort. It is situated within about two miles of Devizes, and is within easy reach of the country residence of Lord Lansdowne. It was here he wrote the biographies of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Lord Byron, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, of which we need only remark that they are industriously compiled and pleasantly written.

In 1824, five years before the passing of the Catholic Relief Act, Moore published "The Memoirs of Captain Rock, written by Himself." It is a bitter, rhapsodical, and of course one-sided commentary upon the government of Ireland by England, not only since the Reformation, but from the time of Pope Adrian's famous bull, which is twisted into an exclusively English grievance and insult.

The next considerable work of Moore's--for his light Parthian warfare in the politics of the hour continued as usual, and with about the same success, as in his younger days--was "The Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion"--a perfectly serious and earnest book in defense of the Roman Catholic faith. There is a vast amount of erudition displayed in its pages; and remembering how slow and painstaking a workman Moore declared himself to be, it must, one would suppose, have been the work of years. The author's object is to prove, from the writings of the early fathers and other evidence, that the peculiar dogmas, and discipline, and practice of the Church of Rome, date from the apostolic age, or at least from the first centuries of the Christian era, and are consequently true. This the writer does entirely, at least, to his own satisfaction, which is the case, we believe, with controversial writers generally. The book concludes with the following words, addressed to the Catholic Church, which his after-life proves to have been earnest and sincere: "In the shadow of thy sacred mysteries let my soul henceforth repose, remote alike from the infidel who scoffs at their darkness, and the rash believer who would pry into its recesses."

These imaginary travels were published anonymously, but the book was always known to be Moore's. Apart from any other evidence, the poetic translations of portions of the writings of ancient bishops would have amply sufficed to determine the authorship.

The last, and, according to Moore's own authority, one of the most successful of his works, as far as a great sale constitutes success, was the prose romance of "The Epicurean." There is much learning displayed in this book, and it contains some striking descriptions. We also meet occasionally with passages of simple and natural beauty and eloquence, the more striking and effective from the contrast they afford to the cumbrous and ambitious rhetoric through which they are sparsely scattered. It was commenced in verse, and gradually reached to a considerable length in that form, but ultimately, like the "Peri's Daughter," broke down irretrievably. No one who respects Mr. Moore's poetical fame will regret this after reading the fragment which has been published. "The Epicurean" is a moral and religious story; and it has this great merit, that it has very little of the merely sensuous imagery in which Mr. Moore generally indulged. The plot is of the most commonplace kind, and the conduct of the story so entirely languid and lulling, that it may be freely indulged in without the slightest fear of ill-consequences by the most nervous and impressionable lady-reader in the three kingdoms.

On the 30th of June, 1827, the day after the publication of "The Epicurean," Moore was one of the gay and distinguished assemblage at a magnificent fete at Boyle Farm, in the environs of London, the cost of which had been clubbed by five or six rich young lords. It appears by Mr. Moore's description to have been a very brilliant affair. There were crowds of the _elite_ of society present of both sexes; well-dressed men and groups of fair women, "all looking their best;" together with dancing, music, the Tyrolese minstrels, and Madame Vestris and Fanny Ayton, rowing up and down the river, singing Moore's "Oh, come to Me when Daylight sets!" and so on. The author of "The Epicurean" relates all this for the purpose of introducing an anecdote concerning his book, and we notice it for the same reason. During one of the pauses of the music, the Marquis of Palmella--Moore _disguises_ the name of the Portuguese embassador in this impenetrable mode, the Marquis of P-lm---a, approaching the poet, remarked upon the magnificence of the fete. Moore agreed. "The tents," he remarked, "had a fine effect." "Nay," said the marquis, "I was thinking of your fete at Athens. I read it this morning in the newspaper." "Confound the newspaper!" Moore had a great aversion to having his best _morceaux_ served up without context in that manner; but worse remained behind. A Mr. D---- accosted him a few minutes afterward, and mentioning the book, added these flattering words, "I never read any thing so touching as the death of your heroine." "What!" exclaimed the delighted author, "have you got so far as that already?" "Oh, dear, no, I have not seen the book--I read what I mentioned in the Literary Gazette." "Shameful!" says Mr. Moore, "to anticipate my catastrophe in that manner!" Perhaps so; but that which we should like especially to know is whether Mr. B----m, who is mentioned as being present at the enunciation of these courtesies, was Mr. Brougham. If so, the flash of the keen gray eyes that followed the compliment on the touching death of Alethe, must, to an observant looker-on, have been one of the most entertaining incidents of the fete.

The smart political squibs, scattered like fire-flies through the dreary waste of journalism during the last active years of Moore's life, are not obnoxious to criticism. Squire Corn, Famished Cotton, Weeping Chancellors, Salmagundian Kings, and knavish Benthamites, as penciled by Moore, have passed from the domain of wit and verse into that of the historian and the antiquary, into the hands of the collector of forgotten trifles; and there we very willingly leave them, pleasant, piquant, and welcome, as we fully admit them in their day to have been. Moore has also written several pieces of religious verse, which, although not of very high merit as poetry, finely at times bring out and illustrate the Christian spirit in its most engaging aspect--unalloyed, unclouded by the mists of fanatic sectarianism.

That Moore was not an inspired creative poet like Shakspeare, Milton, Burns, and a few others, is true; but beneath those heaven-reaching heights there are many still lofty eminences upon which gifted spirits sit enthroned, their brows encircled with coronets bright with gems of purest ray, serene, though pale, indeed, and dim in presence of the radiant crowns of the kings of poetry and song, between whom also there are degrees of glory; for immeasurably above all, far beyond even the constellated splendor of

"The blind old man of Scio's rocky isle,"

soars Shakspeare, palm-wreathed and diademed with stars. One of these lesser heights and circlets must unquestionably be awarded to Thomas Moore. His wing, it must be admitted, is feeble, requiring artificial stimulants and help to lift him above the ground a sufficient time for warbling a brief melody. He did not sing as a flower exhales--from the law and necessity of its nature; still there is at times a grace, and tenderness, and music, about his carefully-polished snatches of song, which the world is not sufficiently rich in to willingly let die.

Turning from Moore the poet to Moore the politician, there is not much to remark upon; neither certainly is there place for two opinions. Moore wrote politics at times--pointed, bitter, rankling politics--but he was really at heart no politician. There was no earnestness in what he did in this way, and it was early and abundantly evident from his alternate eulogies and vituperation of democratic institutions, that he had no firmly-based convictions. His love for Ireland was a sentiment only: it never rose to the dignity of a passion. Not one of his patriotic songs breathes the fiery energy, the martyr zeal, the heroic hate and love, which pulsate in the veins of men who ardently sympathize with a people really oppressed, or presumed to be so. But let us hasten to say, that if there was little of the hero or martyr, there was nothing of the renegade or traitor about Thomas Moore. The pension of three hundred a year obtained for him of the crown by his influential friends was not the reward of baseness or of political tergiversation. It was the prize and reward of his eminence as a writer, and his varied social accomplishments. If he did not feel strongly, he at all events felt honestly; and although he had no mission to evoke the lightning of the national spirit, and hurl its consuming fire at the men who, had they possessed the power, would have riveted the bondage of his people, he could and did soothe their angry paroxysms with lulling words of praise and hope, and, transforming their terribly real, physical, and moral griefs and ills into picturesque and sentimental sorrows, awakened a languid admiration, and a passing sympathy for a nation which could boast such beautiful music, and whose woes were so agreeably, so charmingly sung. Liberal opinions Moore supported by tongue and pen, but then they were fashionable within a sufficiently extensive circle of notabilities, and had nothing of the coarseness and downrightness of vulgar Radicalism about them. The political idiosyncrasy of Moore is developed in the same essential aspect in his memoir of Lord Edward Fitzgerald as in his national songs. There is nothing impassioned, nothing which hurries the pulse or kindles the eye--but a graceful regret, a carefully guarded appreciation of the acts and motives of that unfortunate and misguided nobleman, run throughout. Moore was what men call a fair weather politician--which means, not that storms do not frequently surround them, but that by a prudent forethought, a happy avoidance of prematurely committing themselves, they contrive to make fair weather for themselves, however dark and tempestuous may be the time to other and less sagacious men, and who, when their sun does at last shine, come out with extreme effulgence and brilliancy. Moore, therefore, as a politician, was quite unexceptionable, though not eminent. He was at once a pensioned and unpurchased, and, we verily believe, unpurchasable partisan; an honest, sincere, and very mild patriot; a faithful, and at the same time prudent and circumspect lover of his country, its people, and its faith. There are very high-sounding names in the list of political celebrities, of whom it would be well if such real though not highly-flattering praise could be truly spoken.

Moore's prose works require but little notice at our hands beyond that incidentally bestowed upon them in our passage through his works. None of them that we are acquainted with add at all to the reputation for genius acquired by his poetry. The flow and rhyme of verse are indispensable to carry the reader through stories without probability or interest, and to render men and women, not only without originality--that frequently happens--but destitute of individualism, decently tolerable. We are ignorant of the contributions to the "Edinburgh Review;" but they could scarcely have much enhanced the power and attractiveness of a periodical which in his time numbered among its contributors such names as Jeffrey, Brougham, Sidney Smith, Hallam, Macaulay, and others of that mint and standard. Moore is assigned by his friends a high rank among the defenders or apologists of the Church of Rome; and we believe his "Travels," like Cobbett's "Reformation," have been translated by papal authority and command into most of the languages of Europe. Of his merits in this department of literature, which is quite out of our way, we do not presume to offer an opinion. His book unquestionably displays a vast deal of research and learning; but whether it is so entirely perverse as its adversaries contend, or so pre-eminently irrefragable and convincing as its admirers assert, we really can not say.

It is, after all, in the home-life of individuals that their true character must be read and studied. The poet and the politician--the latter more especially--dwell, as regards their vocations, apart from the household tests which really measure the worth, the truth, the kindliness of individual men and women. Moore, we are pleased to be able to repeat, as a son, a husband, a father, a friend, and neighbor, bore, and deservedly, the highest character. His domestic affections were ardent, tender, and sincere; and the brilliant accomplishments which caused his society to be courted by the great ones of the world, shed their genial charm over the quiet fireside at which sat his wife, and in whose light and warmth the children whose loss has bowed him to the grave, grew up only to bloom and perish. There have been much greater poets, more self-sacrificing, though perhaps no more sincere lovers of their country; but in the intimate relations of domestic life, and the discharge of its common, every-day, but sacred obligations, there are few men who have borne a more unspotted and deservedly-high reputation than Thomas Moore.

THE FAIRY'S CHOICE.

Many, many years ago, before fairies were exploded, and when every noble family had a guardian spirit attached to it, the fairy Aquarella, my heroine, existed. The date is so far back, that it belongs to those good old days known as "once upon a time." Now, Aquarella was the spirit of a pretty, sparkling streamlet, which strayed through the grounds of a mighty lord, in whose welfare she had always been interested. She was but a tiny little thing--one of the progeny of Isis and Thames; but people said she inherited the beauties of both her parents. Her little stream was of the purest water, and in her way she carefully avoided all ugly spots, while her banks were always studded with the choicest flowers. Here, the Narcissus found a fitting mirror for his waxen leaves; here, the water-lilies spread their broad petals, and formed cups fit for a fairy's board; and here, the humble forget-me-not crept under the foliage, nestling close to its birth-place, and looking so innocent, you could scarcely believe it had once lured a gay knight to a melancholy death. Aquarella, however, could never become an accessary to so sad a crime--her waters could never injure any one, save in one place, where the young Lord Albert loved to come and bathe.

The lord's bath, as it was called, was in a sweet, shady spot--the weeping willow and gentle aspen shielded it from the sun's rays, and the bright smooth pebbles that lined it seemed quite to form a pavement. This was Aquarella's favorite retreat, and hither she would calmly repose after her capricious wanderings. Sometimes she would almost hide herself under a sedgy canopy, when you could only trace her course by the deeper verdure on either side of her; and this was the chosen lurking-place of the speckled trout, the rosy dace, and other dandy fish, for she would only allow her waters to be inhabited by the choicest of their kind; slimy eels, vulgar tittlebats, or the voracious pike, were forbidden to approach her court. Sometimes she would tire of this quiet life, and suddenly making a prodigious fuss in the world, would splash around a few great stones that lay in her path, spreading herself out as wide as she could, sparkling and dancing in the sunlight, till each tiny ripple seemed to wear a crown of diamonds, and you could hardly fancy the noisy, smiling waters, belonged to the tranquil stream that had been creeping along so gently.

Few mortals were acquainted with Aquarella; but she was well-known to the gallant kingfisher, to the lordly heron, who would pursue their sport by her banks.

It was when the Lord Albert was a baby, that Aquarella first saw and loved him; his nurses had brought him to bask in her waters. The fairy was resting in her chosen retreat, and never before having noticed a mortal infant, was greatly struck with his beauty. She tempered her natural delicious coolness to receive him, and the child crowed, and clapped his pretty pink fingers, as the clear stream closed around him; he laughed as he emerged from his bath, and struggled for another dip; his women could scarcely tear him away. From that day the bath was his favorite amusement; invisibly supported by Aquarella, he sported in her waters, and each day imbibed new virtues from them. Health, strength, good temper, and good looks--these were the fairy's gifts to her protege, and wherever her wanderings led her, she heard him cited as the kindest, the bravest, the wisest, and the best of young noblemen.

Albert knew not of the beneficent being who protected him, and when he occasionally saw a vapory wreath arising from the brook, he little suspected whom it concealed; and yet if he could have seen Aquarella, her loveliness would have charmed him. She was fair--as all English maidens are--and was attired in the highest fashion of her father's court. Her dress was of that changing blue-green--known to aquatic beauties as mackerel-back--spangled with scales from the gold and silver fish. Some of her father's marine friends had brought her pearls and coral, from the great ocean itself, and with them she looped up her drapery, and braided her long tresses, while over all she threw a rich vail of mist which concealed her from the common gaze; and thus she would float along, hearing the praises of her beloved mortal, or busily occupied in increasing his wealth, ornamenting his ground, and shielding him from evil.

So passed Aquarella's days. She was now seldom seen in her father's court; her whole happiness was centred in Albert. She cared not to join in her sisters' gambols, as each brought their tribute to their august parents--she was pining away for love, and only lived when in Albert's domain; elsewhere she dwindled away till her fond mother feared she would lose all her beauty and animation, and become a mere rillet. It was proposed to unite her waters with those of a neighboring river, who wished to marry, but she would not hear of such a thing, and threatened if it were mentioned again to hide herself underground for the rest of her life.

"But, good gracious! what is to be done?" asked Isis; "we can not let the poor child, our youngest and prettiest, incur the unhappy fate of the unfortunate little Fleet River."

"No, no," replied father Thames, "that must not be; I will take her to-morrow to London Bridge; he is older, and has seen more of the world than any one we know. I dare say he can give us some good advice."

"Very well," said Isis, "you may speak to the Bridge, as you go to meet those nauseous salt rivers; I hate them, they are so rough and roar so when they are angry. I will see what I can learn nearer home, at the Universities; there are plenty of doctors there."

"You had better call at Sion House, too, and Richmond."

"To be sure, that I will; there--where fair queens have fretted and have mourned, where noble ladies have dwelt and wept--they must know something of this strange disease, called Love, for I really fear that is Aquarella's disorder."

"Nonsense! where could she get that complaint?"

"On earth, to be sure. It is very prevalent there, and I am told it is infectious; we can but ask, you know."

The two anxious parents now separated, Isis remaining impatiently till old Thames's return from his sea visit allowed her to proceed on her inland course. They gained but little information at any of the places they had mentioned, as, though such things had occasionally happened in Greece, the case was quite new to all the sages here. Aquarella was the first English fairy who had been known to die of love for a mortal. This low attachment of hers made her friends very unhappy, and at last they summoned her godfather Aquarius. As he was the god of all the rivers, and a very high personage, there was a great deal of ceremony in his reception, and he came to the bed of Thames in a special train of thunder, lightning, and rain, accompanied by his friend Boreas. This high honor made the old couple so proud, that they spread out their waters to make room for him, till they even covered their banks, and frightened all who lived near them.

Aquarius, from his long experience and intimate acquaintance with lady-rivers of all nations, was quite the most proper person to treat with the poor fairy. He did not scold, rough as he was, for he knew scolding was of no good in her complaint; he reasoned with her, but that was scarce more efficient.

"Do you know, child, that to marry this mortal, you must take his religion?"

"And is not that better than ours, your Mightiness?"

"Give up your immortality?"

"And gain his. Ours must cease with this world; his can never end."

"But it may be an immortality of grief?"

"Not unless we deserve it, and we will not. I learned much, your Mightiness, while washing the walls of a little chapel, by whose side I flow."

"You must relinquish your high privileges."

"What are they, without love?"

"Aquarella, you are mad! Do you know what the life of a mortal woman is?"

"Oh, yes. Have I not watched Albert's mother? I know how she spends her days; in providing comforts for son and husband, in instructing the ignorant, in relieving the poor, in doing good to all. Hers is indeed a happy and useful life."

"And suppose Albert should not love you?"

"I could still watch over him."

"Suppose he should become poor--should fall from his high estate?"

"I would work for, and comfort him."

"If he live, he will lose his youthful beauty."

"But he will preserve his virtues."

"He will become old and decrepit."

"I will nurse him."

"She has an answer for every thing; there must be a woman's soul in her. After all--listen to me seriously, daughter--you may indeed do all you say, and become the blessing of Albert's life; but to do this, you must leave your parents, your sisters--leave them, and forever."

"Must I, indeed?"

"You must. Albert is of another class; he may be as good as you, still he is not your equal, nor can you enjoy his love and that of your family. Now choose between them."

"My sisters--my father--Albert."

"Choose--weigh them well in the balance; or one, or the other--both you can not have."

"Does my father disapprove?"

"You can not expect he wishes you to leave him for one of another sort. Your separation must be eternal."

"Will Albert be happy?"

"Why not? Even if he knew you, he could not think much of a wife who could sever herself from her earliest ties."

"My mother, too! No, no, you are right; I should never be happy. What! To feel I had offended those who have the best claim to my love and affection! I must not think of it. Still, are they not a little prejudiced?"

"Perhaps they are; but if you do your duty, their prejudices may eventually give way."

"I am afraid all you say is true; I can not leave them. Oh! I am very miserable. What shall I do?"

"Do good to every one, make yourself useful--that is the only cure for a broken heart."

"Can I help Albert?"

"To be sure you can. And now you have shown yourself to be a dutiful daughter, and a fairy of proper sense, I will teach you how to assist him, and all his fellow-men."

I can not tell all the advice the old god gave to the disconsolate Aquarella, but its consequences were of great benefit to the young lord, and ultimately to all the world, for she consented to restrain her vagaries, and become a useful member of society, a working river. The same lively energy that helped her to quarrel with the stones, now enabled her to turn a mill; there is no saying what amount of water power is within her. Like all really benevolent, sensible persons, she considers no good work a degradation; and her activity is boundless. She has turned from her course to assist a paper manufacturer, her waters are invaluable to a calico printer also, and she may be seen in a bleaching ground.

She is not so wildly beautiful as in her early days, but her banks are still charming, and, like a kind old maiden aunt, she is ever indulgent to youth. She has famous bays, where rosy boys can launch their tiny vessels; deep recesses, where sober anglers enjoy their silent sport; and sweet nooks, where Albert's posterity have often mused on pleasant thoughts, have pledged the faith, and vowed the love denied to the poor fairy, and here her course flows placidly and serenely along, as if she still took an interest in human happiness, and the trifles that compose it.

It is even said that for the greater benefit of mankind, and of the loved one's descendents in particular, she has consented to be united with a sluggish, but wealthy canal, who wishes to get some pure water. This report at present wants good authority; however, we shall see.

At all events the fairy's fate may teach us that all--even those who have known great troubles--may be happy if they do their duty; that no lot is without its trials and its reward, and that there is no cure to sorrow so potent as a good conscience.

A GALLOP FOR LIFE.

About twenty years ago, after a fatiguing London season, I was stopping at the decayed port and bathing village of Parkgate, on the Dee, opposite the equally decayed town and castle of Flint. It was a curious place to choose for amusement, for it had, and has, no recommendation except brackish water, pleasant scenery at high water, and excessive dullness. But, to own the truth, I was in love, desperately in love, with one of the most charming, provoking little sylphs in the world, who, after driving me half crazy in London, was staying on a visit with an uncle, a Welsh parson, at dreary Parkgate. Not that it was dreary to me when Laura was amiable; on the contrary, I wrote to my friends and described it as one of the most delightful watering-places in England, and, by so doing, lost forever the good graces and legacy of my Aunt Grumph, who traveled all the way from Brighton on my description, and only staid long enough to change horses. One sight of the one street of tumble-down houses, in face of a couple of miles of sand and shingle at low water, was enough. She never spoke to me again, except to express her extreme contempt for my opinion.

Our chief amusement was riding on the sand, and sometimes crossing to Flint at low water. You know, of course, that formerly the Dee was a great commercial river, with important ports at Chester, Parkgate, and Flint; but, in the course of time, the banks have fallen in, increasing the breadth at the expense of the depth; so that at Parkgate, whence formerly the Irish packets sailed, the fisher-girls can walk over at low water, merely tucking up their petticoats in crossing the channel, down which the main stream of fresh water flows.

But although this broad expanse of sand affords a firm footing, at low water, for the whole way across, except just round Flint, where there are several quicksands, when the tide turns, in certain states of the wind, the whole estuary is covered with wonderful rapidity; for the tide seems to creep up subterranean channels, and you may find yourself surrounded by salt-water when you least expect it.

This was of no consequence to us, as we were never tied for time. I was teaching Laura to ride on a little Welsh pony, and the sands made a famous riding-school. I laugh now when I think of the little rat of a pony she used to gallop about, for she now struggles into a Brougham of ordinary dimensions with great difficulty, and weighs nearly as much as her late husband, Mr. Alderman Mallard. In a short time, Laura made so much progress in horsemanship that she insisted on mounting my hackney, a full-sized well-bred animal, and putting me on the rat-pony. When I indulged her in this fancy--for of course she had her own way--I had the satisfaction of being rewarded by her roars of laughter at the ridiculous figure I cut, ambling beside her respectable uncle, on his cart-horse cob, with my legs close to the ground, and my nose peering over the little Welshman's shaggy ears, while my fairy galloped round us, drawing all sorts of ridiculous comparisons. This was bad enough, but when Captain Egret, the nephew of my charmer's aunt's husband, a handsome fellow, with "a lovely gray horse, with such a tail," as Laura described it, came up from Chester to stay a few days, I could stand my rat-pony no longer, and felt much too ill to ride out; so stood at the window of my lodgings with my shirt-collar turned down, and Byron in my hand open at one of the most murderous passages, watching Laura on my chestnut, and Captain Egret on his gray, cantering over the deserted bed of the Dee. They were an aggravatingly handsome couple, and the existing state of the law on manslaughter enabled me to derive no satisfaction from the hints contained in the "Giaour" or the "Corsair." These were our favorite books of reference for Young England in those days. Indeed, we were all amateur pirates, and felons in theory; but when I had been cast down in disgust at the debased state of civilization, which prevented me from challenging Captain Egert to single combat, with Laura for the prize of the victor, instead of a cell in Chester Castle, my eyes fell on an advertisement in a local paper, which turned my thoughts into a new channel, of "_Sale of Blood Stock, Hunters, and Hackneys_, at Plas * * *, near Holywell."

I determined to give up murder, and buy another horse, for I could ride as well as the captain; and then what glorious _tete-a-tetes_ I could have, with my hand on the pommel of Laura's side-saddle. The idea put me in good-humor. Regimental duties having suddenly recalled Captain Egret, I spent a delightful evening with Laura; she quite approved of my project, and begged that I would choose a horse "with a long tail, of a pretty color," which is every young lady's idea of what a horse should be.

Accordingly I mounted my chestnut on a bright morning of July, and rode across to Flint, accompanied by a man to bring back my intended purchase. It was dead low water; when, full of happy thoughts, in the still warm silence of the summer morning, holding my eager horse hard in, I rode at a foot-pace across the smooth, hard, wave-marked bed of the river. There was not a cloud in the sky. The sun, rising slowly, cast a golden glow over the sparkling sand. Pat-pat-pit-pat, went my horse's feet, not loud enough to disturb the busy crows and gulls seeking their breakfast; they were not afraid of me; they knew I had no gun. I remember it; I see it all before me, as if it were yesterday, for it was one of the most delicious moments of my life. But the screaming gulls and whistling curlews were put to flight, before I had half crossed the river's bed, by the cheerful chatter, laughter, and fragments of Welsh airs sung in chorus by a hearty crowd of cockle and mussel gatherers, fishermen, and farmers' wives, on their way to the market on the Cheshire side--men, women (they were the majority), and children, on foot, on ponies, and donkeys, and in little carts. Exchanging good-humored jokes, I passed on until I came to the ford of the channel, where the river runs between banks of deep soft sand. At low water, at certain points, in summer, it is but a few inches deep; but after heavy rains, and soon after the turning of the tide, the depth increases rapidly.

At the ford I met a second detachment of Welsh peasantry preparing to cross, by making bundles of shoes and stockings, and tucking up petticoats very deftly. Great was the fun and the splashing, and plenty of jokes on the _Saxon_ and his red horse going the wrong way. The Welsh girls in this part of the country are very pretty, with beautiful complexions, a gleam of gold in their dark hair, and an easy, graceful walk, from the habit of carrying the water-pitchers from the wells on their heads. The scene made me feel any thing but melancholy or ill-natured. I could not help turning back to help a couple of little damsels across, pillion-wise, who seemed terribly afraid of wetting their finery at the foot ford.

Having passed the channels, the wheels and footmarks formed a plain direction for a safe route, which, leaving Flint Castle on my right, brought me into the centre of Flint, without any need of a guide. The rest of my road was straightforward and commonplace. I reached the farm where the sale was to take place, in time for breakfast, and was soon lost in a crowd of country squires, Welsh parsons, farmers, horse-dealers, and grooms.

Late in the day I purchased a brown stallion, with a strain of Arab blood, rather undersized, but compact, and one of the handsomest horses I ever saw before or since, very powerful, nearly thorough-bred. When the auctioneer had knocked him down to me, I said to one of the grooms of the establishment who was helping my man--handing him a crown-piece at the same time:

"As the little brown horse is mine, with all faults, just have the goodness to tell me what is his fault?"

"Why, sir," he answered, "he can walk, trot, gallop, and jump, first rate, surely; but he's very awkward to mount; and when you are on, he'll try uncommon hard to get you off, for two minutes; if you stick fast, he will be quiet enough all day."

"Thank you, my man," I replied; "I'll try him directly."

Just before starting I found the chestnut had a shoe loose, and had to send him to the nearest village, two miles off. I had promised Laura to return by eight o'clock, to finish a delightful book we were reading aloud together, until the tiff about Captain Egret had interrupted us. You may judge if I was not impatient; and yet, with fifteen miles to ride to Flint, I had no time to spare.

My friend, the groom, saddled the brown horse, and brought him down to the open road to me. He trotted along, with shining coat and arched neck, snorting and waving his great tail like a lion. As he piaffed and paraded sideways along, casting back his full eye most wickedly, every motion spoke mischief; but there was no time for consideration; I had barely an hour to do fifteen miles of rough roads before crossing the river, and must get to the river-side, cool. I had intended to have ridden the chestnut, who was experienced in water, but the loose shoe upset that arrangement.

Without giving him any time to see what I was about, I caught him by the mane and the reins, threw myself from a sloping bank into the saddle, and, although he dragged the groom across the road, I had both feet in the stirrups before he burst from his hold. Snorting fiercely, he bucked and plunged until I thought the girths would surely crack; but other horsemen galloping past, enabled me to bustle him into full speed, and in five minutes he settled down into a long, luxurious stride, with his legs under his haunches, that felt like a common canter, but really devoured the way, and swept me past every thing on the road. Up hill and down, it was all the same, he bounded, like a machine full of power on the softest of steel-springs.

Ten miles were soon past, and we reached Holywell; up the steep hill and through the town, and down the steep narrow lanes, we went, and reached the level road along the shore leading to Flint, without halt, until within two miles of that town; then I drew bridle, to walk in cool.

By this time the weather, which had been bright all day, had changed; a few heat drops of rain fell, thunder was heard rolling in the distance, and a wind seemed rising and murmuring from the sea.

I looked at my watch as we entered the town; it was an hour past the time when I intended to have crossed--but Laura must not be disappointed; so I only halted at the inn long enough to let the brown wash his mouth out, and, without dismounting, rode on to the guide's house. As I passed the Castle, I heard a band playing; it was a party of officers, with their friends, who had come up on a pic-nic from Chester.

When I reached the cottage of old David, the guide, he was sitting on the bench at the door, putting on his shoes and stockings; and part of the party I had met in the morning, as they passed, cried, "You're late, master; you must hurry on to cross to-night." David was beginning to dissuade me; but when I threw him a shilling, and trotted on, he followed me, pattering down the beach.

"You must make haste, master, for the wind's getting up, and will bring the tide like a roaring lion--it will. But I suppose the pretty lady with the rosy face expects you. But where's the red horse? I wish you had him. I do not like strange horses on such a time as this--indeed, and I do not," he added. But I had no time for explanations, although David was a great ally of ours. I knew I was expected; it was getting dusk, and Laura would be anxious, _I hoped_.

Pushing briskly along, we soon reached the ford of the channel, so calm and shallow in the morning, but now filling fast with the tide; dark clouds were covering the sky, and the wind brought up a hollow murmuring sound.

"Now get across, young gentleman, as fast as you can, and keep your eye on the wind-mill, and don't spare your spurs, and you will have plenty of time; so, good-evening, God bless you! young gentleman, and the pretty lady, too," cried David, honestest of Welsh guides.

I tried to walk the brown horse through the ford where it was not more than three or four feet deep; but he first refused; then, when pressed, plunged fiercely in, and was out of his depth in a moment. He swam boldly enough, but obstinately kept his head down the stream, so that, instead of landing on an easy, shelving shore, he came out where all but a perpendicular bank of soft sand had to be leaped and climbed over. After several unsuccessful efforts, I was obliged to slip off, and climb up on foot, side by side with my horse, holding on by the flap of the saddle. If I had not dismounted, we should probably have rolled back together.

When I reached the top of the bank, rather out of breath, I looked back, and saw David making piteous signs, as he moved off rapidly, for me to push along. But this was easier said than done; the brown horse would not let me come near him. Round and round he went, rearing and plunging, until I was quite exhausted. Coaxing and threatening were alike useless; every moment it was getting darker. Once I thought of letting the brute go, and swimming back to David. But when I looked at the stream, and thought of Laura, that idea was dismissed. Another tussle, in which we plowed up the sand in a circle, was equally fruitless, and I began to think he would keep me there to be drowned, for to cross the Parkgate on foot before the tide came up strong, seemed hopeless. At length, finding I could not get to touch his shoulder, I seized the opportunity, when he was close to the bank of the stream, and catching the curb sharply in both hands, backed him half way down almost into the water. Before he had quite struggled up to the top, I threw myself into the saddle, and was carried off at the rate of thirty miles an hour toward the sea.

But I soon gathered up the reins, and, firm in my seat, turned my Tartar's head toward the point where I could see the white wind-mill gleaming through the twilight on the Cheshire shore.

I felt that I had not a moment to spare. The sand, so firm in the morning, sounded damp under my horse's stride; the little stagnant pools filled visibly, and joining formed shallow lakes, through which we dashed in a shower of spray; and every now and then we leaped over, or plunged into deep holes. At first I tried to choose a path, but as it rapidly grew darker, I sat back in my saddle, and with my eyes fixed on the tower of the wind-mill, held my horse firmly into a hand gallop, and kept a straight line. He was a famous deep-chested, long-striding, little fellow, and bounded along as fresh as when I started. By degrees my spirits began to rise; I thought the danger past; I felt confidence in myself and horse, and shouted to him in encouraging triumph. Already I was, in imagination, landed and relating my day's adventures to Laura, when with a heavy plunge down on his head, right over went the brown stallion, and away I flew as far as the reins, fortunately fast grasped, would let me. Blinded with wet sand, startled, shaken, confused, by a sort of instinct, I scrambled to my feet almost as soon as my horse, who had fallen over a set of salmon-net stakes. Even in the instant of my fall, all the honor of my situation was mentally visible to me. In a moment I lived years. I felt that I was a dead man; I wondered if my body would be found; I thought of what my friends would say; I thought of letters in my desk I wished burned. I thought of relatives to whom my journey to Parkgate was unknown, of debts I wished paid, of parties with whom I had quarreled, and wished I had been reconciled. I wondered whether Laura would mourn for me, whether she really loved me. In fact, the most serious and ridiculous thoughts were jumbled altogether, while I muttered, once or twice, a hasty prayer; and yet I did not lose a moment in remounting. This time my horse made no resistance, but stood over his hocks in a pool of salt water, and trembled and snorted--not fiercely, but in fear. There was no time to lose. I looked round for the dark line of the shore; it had sunk in the twilight. I looked again for the white tower; it had disappeared. The fall and the rolling, and turning of the horse in rising, had confused all my notions of the points of the compass. I could not tell whether it was the dark clouds from the sea, or the dizzy whirling of my brain; but it seemed to have become black night in a moment.

The water seemed to flow in all directions round and round. I tried, but could not tell which was the sea, and which the river side. The wind, too, seemed to shift and blow from all points of the compass.

Then, "Softly," I said to myself, "be calm; you are confused by terror; be a man;" and pride came to my rescue. I closed my eyes for a moment, and whispered, "Oh Lord, save me." Then with an effort, calmer, as though I had gulped down something, I opened my eyes, stood up in my stirrups, and peered into the darkness. As far as I could see, were patches of water eating up the dry bits of sand; as far as I could hear, a rushing tide was on all sides. Four times, in different directions, I pushed on, and stopped when I found the water rising over the shoulders of my horse.

I drew up on a sort of island of sand, which was every minute growing less, and gathering all the strength of my lungs, shouted again and again, and then listened; but there came no answering shout. Suddenly, a sound of music came floating past me. I could distinguish the air; it was the military band playing "Home, sweet Home." I tried to gather from what quarter the sound came; but each time the wind instruments brayed out loudly, the sounds seemed to come to me from every direction at once. "Ah!" I thought, "I shall see home no more." I could have wept, but I had no time; my eyes were staring through the darkness, and my horse plunging and rearing, gave me no rest for weeping. I gave him his head once, having heard that horses, from ships sunk at sea, have reached land distant ten miles, by instinct; but the alternation of land, and shallow and deep water confused his senses, and destroyed the calm power which might have been developed in the mere act of swimming.

At length, after a series of vain efforts, I grew calm and resigned. I made up my mind to die. I took my handkerchief from my neck, and tied my pocket-book to the D's of the saddle. I pulled my rings off my fingers, and put them in my pocket--I had heard of wreckers cutting off the fingers of drowned men--and then was on the point of dashing forward at random, when some inner feeling made me cast another steady glance all round. At that moment, just behind me, something sparkled twice, and disappeared, and then reappearing, shone faintly, but so steadily, that there could be no doubt it was a light on the Cheshire shore. In an instant my horse's head was turned round. I had gathered him together, dug in the spurs, and crying from the bottom of my heart, "Thank God!" in the same moment, not profanely, but with a horseman's instinct, shouting encouragingly, and dashed away toward the light. It was a hard fight; the ground seemed melting from under us--now struggling through soft sand, now splashing over hard, now swimming (that was easy), and now and again leaping and half falling, but never losing hold of my horse or sight of the beacon; we forced through every obstacle, until at length the water grew shallower and shallower; we reached the sand, and, passing the sand, rattled over the shingle at high-water mark--and I was saved! But I did not, could not stop; up the loose shingles I pressed on to the light that had saved me. I could not rest one instant, even for thanksgiving, until I knew to what providential circumstance I owed my safety. I drew up at a fisherman's hut of the humblest kind, built on the highest part of the shore, full two miles from Parkgate; a light, which seemed faint when close to it, twinkled from a small latticed window. I threw myself from my horse, and knocked loudly at the door, and as I knocked, fumbled with one hand in my soaked pocket for my purse. Twice I knocked again, and the door, which was unhasped, flew open. A woman, weeping bitterly, rose at this rude summons; and at the same moment I saw on the table the small coffin of a young child, with a rushlight burning at either end. I owed my life to death!

SKETCHES OF ORIENTAL LIFE.

BY F.A. NEALE, ESQ.

LIFE OF A TURKISH GENTLEMAN.

The life of the Turkish Effendi, or gentleman, at Antioch, is rather of a monotonous character. He lives in his own, or rather in two houses--for the harem, though part of the same house, is entirely partitioned off, and no one but himself and his slaves know where it is, or how to get in or out of it. He always keeps the door-key in his pocket, and when the ladies want any thing, they rap, like so many woodpeckers, at a kind of revolving cupboard, which is securely fastened into the wall. Through this cupboard at which neither party can see the other, the lady speaks to the servant, and tells him what to fetch or buy for her at the bazaars; and the article is brought and placed in the cupboard, which is wheeled round by the lady inside, so that she may take it out. When they are desirous of walking in the garden, or going to the bath, the key is delivered into the charge of some old duenna, and the Effendi sees nothing more of it till the party has returned, and the ladies are safely locked up again.

The Effendi is, generally speaking, an early riser, and seldom sits up till a late hour at night. On issuing from his harem, he is waited upon by half a dozen slaves, who assist in his ablutions: one holds the ewer, another the soap, a third the towel, and a fourth and fifth assist him with his clean apparel. Having washed and dressed, he goes through his morning devotions at the nearest mosque. Returning home, his servants serve him with his cup of bitter coffee and pipe of real gibili, by which time it is about seven A.M., the fashionable hour for a Turkish gentleman to call and receive visits. Acquaintances and friends saunter in, and salute the host, who salutes them. Beyond this, there is little conversation; for Turks hate talking; and still less joking, for they detest laughing. They inquire like a parcel of anxious doctors, very kindly after each other's health, and after the general salubrity of their respective houses, for no one ever dreams of asking how his friend's wife is; that would be considered the grossest breach of decorum. Draft-boards, and pipes, and coffee are introduced. Some play, others look on; and, save the rattling of the dice, very little is heard to interrupt the silence of the room. The Effendi's clerk comes in occasionally, with a batch of unanswered letters in his hands, and whispers mysteriously to the Effendi, who either goes off into a violent fit of rage, or nods his consent in approval of what has been done, just as the contents of the letter are pleasing or the reverse. Most of these letters are from the overseers, or the laborers in the Effendi's silk-gardens, or olive-plantations; some few from people craving his assistance; others demanding repayment of loans of money; for there are but few of the Effendis of Antioch, though all rolling in riches, that are not indebted to some person or other for cash loans, as, such is their strange avarice, that though they possess (to use an Oriental expression) rooms full of money, they are loth to extract one farthing from their treasures for their daily expenditure.

About ten A.M., the Effendi orders his horse, and followed by his pipe-bearer, who is equally well-mounted, takes a sedate ride in the environs of the town. On Saturdays, in lieu of riding, he goes to the bath, but in either case he is pretty punctual as to the hour of his return. On reaching home, more pipes and coffee are produced, and he affixes his seal (for a Turk never signs his name) to the various business letters that his secretary has prepared, ready for dispatching. The cry from the minaret now warns him that it is the hour for mid-day prayer. Washing his hands, face, and feet, he proceeds to the sami (mosque), where he remains till it is time to breakfast; and when the breakfast is served, he goes through the forms of ablution again. After his meals, he is required to wash once more.

I may here remark, for the guidance of strangers, that there is nothing a Turk considers more degrading than the want of this scrupulous cleanliness in Europeans; and considering the climate, and the wisdom of doing in Rome as Rome does (apart from all other arguments), travelers, although seldom obliged to use their fingers as Turks do at their meals, ought strictly to adhere to this custom while among Orientals.

The Effendi, after his breakfast, which is generally a very good one, and is prepared by the careful hands of the fair ladies of the harem, retires into his seraglio for a couple of hours' siesta, during the heat of the day. In this interval, if a Pasha, or a bosom-friend, or the devil himself were to appear, and ask of the servants to see their master immediately, they would reply that he was asleep in the harem, and that it was as much as their heads were worth to disturb him.

At about two, P.M., the Effendi is again visible. He then occupies his time in playing drafts, or reading a Turkish newspaper. At four, he goes once more to the mosque, and thence proceeds to the secluded garden, on the banks of the Orontes. Here several other Effendis are sure to meet him, for it is their usual evening rendezvous. Carpets are spread; baskets of cucumbers and bottles of spirit produced; and they drink brandy, and nibble cucumbers, till nigh upon sundown. Sometimes cachouks, or dancing boys, dressed up in gaudy tinsel-work, and musicians, are introduced, for the entertainment of the party. By nightfall, every individual has finished his two--some more--bottles of strong _aqua vitae_, and they return homeward, and dine--and dine heartily. Coffee is then introduced, but nothing stronger--as they never drink spirit or wine after their evening meals. The nine o'clock summons to prayer, resounds from the minaret, and nine minutes after that, the Effendi is fast asleep, and nothing under an earthquake would bring him forth from the harem again, till he rises simultanously with the sun next day.

LIVING IN ANTIOCH.

Antioch is, beyond dispute, the cheapest place in the world, as well as one of the healthiest; and if it were not for the ragged little boys, who hoot at every stranger, and throw stones at his door, annoying you in every possible way, I should prefer it, as a place of residence, to any spot I have visited in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America.

My house was of perfectly new construction, well planted, and well situated, and proof against water, as well as wind. I had four rooms--a sitting-room, a dining-room, a bed-room, and a dressing-room. I had a walled inclosure of about eighty feet square, where roses and geraniums vied in beauty with jessamines and lilies. There was also a poultry-yard, a pigeon-house, stables for three horses, a store-house, a kitchen, and a servants' room. I had in the garden a grape-vine (muscatel), a pomegranate-tree, a peach-tree, a plum-tree, an apricot, and a China quince; and, in addition to all these, a fountain perpetually jetting up water, and a well, and a bathing-room. For all this accommodation, I paid three hundred and fifty piastres--about three pounds sterling--and this was a higher rent than would be paid by any native. Of course, the house was unfurnished, but furniture in the East is seldom on a grand scale: a divan, half a dozen chairs, a bedstead, a mattress, a looking-glass, a table or two, and half a dozen pipes, and narghilies are all one requires. Servants cost about three pounds a head per annum. Seven and a half pounds of good mutton may be had for a shilling. Fowls--and fat ones, too--twopence each. Fish is sold by the weight--thirteen rotolos for a beshlik, or about seventy pounds weight for a shilling. Eels--the very best flavored in the world--three halfpence each. As for vegetables, whether cabbages, lettuces, _des asperges_, celery, watercresses, parsley, beans, peas, radishes, turnips, carrots, cauliflowers, and onions, a pennyworth would last a man a week. Fruit is sold at the same rates; and grapes cost about five shillings the horse-load. Game is also abundant. Dried fruits and nuts can be obtained in winter. In fact, living as well as one could wish, I found it impossible--house-rent, servants, horses, board, washing, and wine included--to exceed the expenditure of forty pounds per annum.

Under these circumstances, it may appear marvelous that many Europeans, possessed of limited means, have not made Antioch their temporary home; but every question has two sides, and every thing its _pros_ and _cons_. The cons, in this instance, are the barbarous character of the people among whom you live; the perpetual liability of becoming, at one instant's warning, the victim of some fanatical _emeute_; the small hopes you have of redress for the grossest insults offered; the continual intrigues entered into by the Ayans to disturb your peace and comfort; the absence of many of the luxuries enjoyed in Europe; the want of society and books, and the total absence of all places of worship, which gradually creates in the mind a morbid indifference to religion, and which feeling frequently degenerates into absolute infidelity. It is better to choose with David in such a case, and say, "I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord than dwell in the tents of iniquity."

AN ENGLISH PHILANTHROPIST IN THE EAST.

Two hours and a half ride from Antioch, through a country that is a perfect paradise upon earth, but over the most execrable and detestable: road, brought me to the ancient Seleucia. Famed in the olden history as the emporium of Eastern commerce and as a port unequaled for safe harborage, Suedia is celebrated in our own days as having been the residence and favorite retreat of the late John Barker, Esq., formerly her Majesty's Consul-general in Egypt, equally eminent as a philanthropist and a Christian gentleman.

Suedia, or, as it is termed by the Syrians, Zectoonli, embraces a wide range of mulberry gardens, extending over a space of ten miles by three, and containing a scattered and mixed population, equal, if not exceeding in number, to that of Antioch. The village is spread chiefly upon the banks of the Orontes, and running parallel with the beach, which forms a boundary to the waves of the Seleucian gulf where the Orontes ends her course, and nature has scattered around her choicest gifts.

It would require the pen of an inspired writer to describe in adequate colors this garden of Eden. Mulberry, lemon, and orange-trees form an uninterrupted succession of gardens, surrounding picturesque little cottages, each one eclipsing the other in neatness and beauty of situation. The peasants themselves are hale, robust, and sturdy-looking men; the children are rosy and healthy; and the women beautiful, innocent, and happy. Each stops, as a stranger passes, to make a bashful salute, and bid him welcome to their country. This is what I never met elsewhere; and it was very pleasing to find uncivilized and untaught Arabs so polite and courteous. There is, in fact, nothing that a native of Suedia will not do to render a sojourn among them agreeable and pleasant. They are a simple people, and as simple in their habits as in their character. The sun teaches them when to rise, and darkness when to seek their beds. They labor for subsistence; they sleep for refreshment; they laugh with the merry, and weep with the afflicted. Their simple old pastor, in their venerable rustic church, has pointed out to them from childhood how heinous is sin--how amiable virtue; and they are taught ever to remember that an all-seeing Eye will detect and punish sins hidden to men, as surely as public offenses will entail flagellation from the pasha and governors of the district. Thus they live happy in their innocence, and in each other, and almost void of offense toward God and man; a meet people to inhabit a country like that they dwell in.

To this quiet retreat, Mr. Barker, after zealously serving his king and country for a long period of years, retired, on quitting Egypt, to enjoy in seclusion the pension awarded him by the government, and devote the remainder of his days to the peaceful pursuit of agriculture. Few men could better appreciate the rich gifts Nature had lavished on this spot. A perfect botanist, and skilled in agriculture, his time and income during a period of nearly twenty years, were spent in promoting every improvement in the cultivation of the soil; and many have grown rich, directly or indirectly, from the methods of tillage introduced into the country by Mr. Barker.

On taking possession of his wife's landed inheritance, Mr. Barker's first steps were to erect an edifice becoming his means and station, and one that would render his sojourn in the country agreeable to himself and his family, and the many friends and strangers, who delighted in visiting him, remaining his guests for days, weeks, and, in some instances, months. There was no mistake as to the genuine hospitality of the worthy host. His word of welcome was truth itself; and the warm cordiality of his excellent heart was felt in the firm grasp of his hand. "Sir," he has said to me on more than one occasion, "it is the traveler who confers a favor upon me by remaining, and giving me the benefit of his society, provided he be a man that is at all sufferable. Some few, I must own, have staid longer than myself or my family could have wished, but they have been very few." A perfect gentleman, an accomplished scholar, a sagacious thinker, a philosopher, and philanthropist, people wondered how so great a heart could content itself to remain in a place like Suedia. I had the honor to be on intimate terms with him during my two years' residence in Suedia, and I learned to love and respect him so much, that when he died, full of years and honor, I felt a void in my heart, to which I still recur with the deepest regret.

Mr. Barker's main object in life was to confer benefits upon his suffering neighbors. He knew how much misery and wretchedness was to be every day met with in England, and how incompetent were his means, all-sufficient though they were for his own wants, to relieve such distress; but in Syria a more available field for benevolence presented itself. How far and how well his charitable disposition exerted itself may be imagined, when I say that out of more than six thousand inhabitants, there is not one who does not to this day bless the memory of the good man, who through so many years was the friend of all. I ought to add that through fifty years of uninterrupted intercourse with as many thousand people, he never made one enemy, but was universally respected and beloved.

The gardens of Mr. Barker have been long celebrated for the quantity, variety, and excellent quality of their fruit. In the piece of ground attached to his own private residence, I have plucked from the tree the guava, the sweet-kerneled apricot, the Stanwick nectarine (for which the Duke of Northumberland obtained for him a silver medal), the sweet-kerneled peach, the shucapara, the celebrated apricot of Damascus, the plaqueminia kaki, the loquot or nepolis japonica, the mandarin, and the Malta blood-orange; in short, the fruit of every country in the world. At Mr. Barker's request, I wrote to Penang and China for seeds of some rare fruits and spices, which Colonel Butterworth and Sir George Bonham had the kindness to send me; and though previously produced solely in those climes, they have since sprung up in these charming gardens. But, alas! they did not thus display themselves till the excellent old man had passed away. On the demise of Mr. Barker, the whole of his landed property reverted to his amiable and kind-hearted widow.

Besides introducing the finest fruit-trees in the world, and many rare ornamental trees, from the cuttings and graftings of which the whole of the gardens of Suedia have been supplied, Mr. Barker greatly ameliorated the conditions of the natives by obtaining from Italy regular supplies of the best silk worm seed, which was then divided among them. Originally, the silk produced was of a very inferior quality; it has now become the finest in any part of the East. As for flowers, it was a perfect sight to see the garden attached to Mr. Barker's house at any season of the year, even in the depth of winter, when the surrounding mountains were covered with snow, and every where else vegetation had disappeared, thousands of Bengal roses and other rare and beautiful flowers here presented the appearance of perpetual summer.

A ROMANCE OF CYPRUS.

Every traveler who has ever visited Cyprus has heard of Signor Baldo Matteo, the Ebenezer Scrooge of the East. While I was at Larnaca, a sad adventure, furnishing ample materials for a melodrama, nearly terminated old Baldo's life, and all his speculations. His only daughter, and heiress, lost her heart to a needy Austrian, who had come to Cyprus expressly to make his fortune by marriage. Hearing of the wealth of old Baldo, and of his daughter, he fixed upon him at once; but Baldo was not to be easily caught, and totally repulsed every advance. The Austrian grew desperate, and, as a final resource, became fanatically religious, attending the Catholic chapel morning, noon, and night. Nothing could exceed his devotion to a certain old priest troubled with the cramp, on whose leg he sat, whenever it was attacked, till the pain passed off. When, after this, he whispered to him the sin that preyed most heavily upon his mind, which was a wish to possess riches, that he might bestow them on Mother Church, and hinted at a passion for Miss Baldo, he received immediate absolution, and was next day dining at old Baldo's table, in company with the Padre Presidenti, and seated next to the object in whom all his hopes were concentrated. Miss Baldo was luckily placed on his right, and heard with unspeakable rapture all his protestations of love and devotion. Had she been on his left, these would all have been lost, as she had been perfectly deaf on that side from her birth.

To be brief, the Austrian proposed, and was accepted, and all that he had now to obtain was old Baldo's consent. Baldo, however, as a man of the world, saw clearly through his designs, and knew him to be a knave, though he had too much reverence for the priestly clique, who had introduced the Austrian, to give a decided negative. All he asked was time--a year--to consider so important a measure. This was accorded, and Baldo devoutly prayed that the true character of his daughter's suitor might before that time be unmasked. His prayer was granted, but in a way the least expected, and certainly the least agreeable to himself.

The lover of the Signorina Baldo, finding his exchequer rather low, and being sorrowfully conscious of his inability to increase his wealth, so as to enable him to keep up necessary appearances, came to the desperate resolution of grasping, without further delay, his intended wife's fortune, by sending poor old Baldo out of the world. Accordingly, armed with a loaded double-barreled pistol, which he concealed about his person, he proceeded to Matteo's house at an hour when he knew he would find him alone, the daughter and servants being in the habit of attending high mass on Sunday mornings; and he knocked at the door, which, after a little hesitation, was opened to him. Old Baldo, though believed to be an honorable man, and fair and just in his transactions with others, was a confirmed miser. He had accumulated great sums in hard cash, which, unseen by human eye, he had buried in his garden, and hidden in various parts of his house. The house was going to ruin, and wanted whitewashing and repairing in many parts. The garden was a perfect wilderness of weeds and thistles; but these he set fire to regularly once a year, and by this means, to a certain extent, kept them under. As for gardeners armed with a spade, which might dig up and bring to light all kinds of secret hoards, if there was one trade Baldo detested, it was this. He kept the key of his walled-in garden, and on Sundays, when all his family were absent, he strolled about in it till their return.

He was thus occupied when he admitted his would-be son-in-law; and the first thing this promising youth did, was to draw forth his pistol and take deliberate aim, discharging it at the breast of the feeble old man, who, tottering backward a few paces, fell to the earth apparently a corpse. For such the murderer took him; and depositing the pistol close by his side, to make it appear he had died by his own hand, he rushed into the street, closing the door after him.

Running with the haste of a man charged with some important news, he came suddenly on a gentleman attached to the Austrian consulate, whom he breathlessly informed that passing near Baldo's house, he had heard the report of a pistol, followed by a sound like that of some heavy body falling to the earth, that he had in vain knocked at the door for admission, and that he had no doubt in his own mind that some sad catastrophe had occurred.

In a few seconds a perfect mob was collected at Baldo's door, which they broke open, and rushing in, beheld old Baldo stretched upon the ground, his clothes literally saturated with blood, and a pistol lying close by his side. The assassin, who never dreamt that the old man was still alive, witnessed this spectacle with fiendish triumph, though loudly lamenting the loss of him, whom he called the best friend on earth. But it happened that the ball, though it struck against a part where a wound would have been mortal, had come in contact with the sharp edge of a bone, which turned it in another direction, and it was now safely lodged between the skin and the spine. Baldo, who had fainted from fright and loss of blood, now, to the amazement of all, recovered his senses, and hearing the voice of his late assailant, slowly raised himself up, and denounced him on the spot. Having done this, he fell back, and again became unconscious. The wretch was immediately seized and handcuffed, and safely borne away to the Austrian consulate, where he was placed in confinement.

Doctors were now assembled from all parts of Cyprus, and all examined the wound, and declared it fatal, expressing the greatest surprise that the patient should have lingered so long. The blood being stanched, and Baldo suffering from no real injury, but laboring under a sense of approaching dissolution, begged that a confessor might be sent for. To this confessor, he acknowledged, among other offenses, the commission of one sin which weighed heavier than all the rest upon his guilty conscience. It appeared that his niece, who was then married to a French merchant at Larnaca, had been left at a very early age an orphan, and had become his ward. She had, however, been well provided for by her parents, and a large sum of money had been deposited in his hands, which, after covering the expenses of her education and board, &c., would still leave a considerable surplus as a marriage portion. Now old Baldo, never forgetting his thrift, had more than twice turned this capital over before the date of the niece's marriage, but he had retained the proceeds of his own, handing over the principal to the bridegroom on the nuptial day. But on the approach of death, as it seemed, he felt considerable qualms of conscience, and confessed his unworthy stewardship, and indicated the spots where these savings were concealed. The husband of the niece quickly dug them up, and came into possession. Scarcely was this done, when Baldo recovered, and would almost have forgiven the attempt upon his life, had it not involved such serious results.

The Austrian was by the Turkish authorities handed over to his own consulate, and was eventually removed to Trieste, but I believe, for lack of sufficient testimony, escaped punishment. This affair, as it may be imagined, created a great sensation in Cyprus, which was once the scene of the memorable tragedy which terminated the life of Desdemona.

ANECDOTES OF A PRIEST.

It was in Nicosia, about the year 1840, that Dame Fortune once more played off one of her eccentric frolics on the person of a poor Greek priest, who had little to depend upon in this world, save such meagre offerings as the more charitable of his parishioners bestowed upon him. As the story goes, he was a devout and holy man, but beyond being able to go through the regular routine of his priestly office, possessed but scant learning, and was equally ignorant of the world's ways and manners. At the commencement of a fast, fearing he should, from his defective memory, forget its exact duration, he carefully filled his pockets with so many dried peas as there were fast days, and each day extracting one from his pockets, as the peas diminished, he was warned of the proximity of a feast, and prepared accordingly. On one occasion, his wife happening to find a few peas in her husband's pockets, and imagining the devout man was fond of this Eastern luxury, very affectionately replenished his pockets from her own store of cadamies, or roasted peas. Great was the consternation of his congregation, when on the eve of the feast day, instead of proclaiming its advent from the pulpit, as is usual, he informed them that eight or ten days yet remained for the approaching festival. A discussion on this point immediately ensued, when the priest, in confirmation of what he asserted, produced from his pocket the remaining peas, making known at the same time his method of calculating. Upon this, his wife stepped forward, and acknowledged what she had done, and great merriment ensued, in which the priest joined.

To this poor man, fortune now brought one of those rare windfalls which are more frequently heard of than experienced. One summer's evening he was seated in the courtyard of his humble house, watching with satisfaction and delight the gambols of his little children, who were amusing themselves with throwing stones at a hole in the wall. At length he remarked, that whenever a stone chanced to go near the crevice, he heard a ringing sound, and to convince himself that he was not deceived, he stepped nearer, and hit it repeatedly with a stone, each time hearing the sound distinctly. It now occurred to him that there was some concealed treasure within, and the thought made him tremble with expectation. He went to bed early, but not to sleep, having formed the determination that he would that night make a rigorous search. When all was still, he rose from his sleepless couch, and going out stealthily and noiselessly, commenced, by aid of a small pickax, breaking into the wall, removing stone by stone. He had hardly worked an hour, when out fell a bag of doubloons, followed by a second and a third. This was indeed a treasure, sufficient to satisfy a more covetous man; but he felt there would be no safety with it in Cyprus. That very night, he carefully stowed his riches in two saddle-bags, and before daybreak, awoke his wife and acquainted her with their good fortune, when horses were hired at a neighboring khan, and priest, wife, and children turned their backs upon Nicosia, and arriving early at Larnaca, embarked that very day on board a vessel sailing for Italy. The priest became the head of one of the wealthiest mercantile firms now established at Leghorn, and is, I believe, still living.

THE SHADOW OF BEN JONSON'S MOTHER.

In Hartshorn Lane, near Charing Cross, about the year 1580, dwells Mr. Thomas Fowler, a master bricklayer. He had married, in 1575, Mrs. Margaret Jonson, a widow; and had become the protector of her little boy, Benjamin, then about a year and a half old.

Benjamin is now in his sixth year. He duly attends the parish school in St. Martin's Church; for his father was "a grave minister of the gospel," and his mother is anxious that her only child, poor although he must be, shall lack no advantages of education. We see the sturdy boy daily pacing to school, through the rough and miry way of that half-rural district. In his play-hours he is soon in the fields, picking blackberries in Hedge-lane, or flying his kite by the Windmill in Saint Giles's. His father-in-law is a plain, industrious, trusty man--not rich enough to undertake any of the large works which the luxurious wants of the town present; and oft-times interfered with, in the due course of his labor, by royal proclamations against the increase of houses, which are rigidly enforced when a humble man desires to build a cottage. But young Ben has found friends. To the parish school sometimes comes Master Camden; and he observes the bold boy, always at the head of his class, and not unfrequently having his "clear and fair skin" disfigured by combats with his dirty companions, who litter about the alleys of Saint Martin's-lane. The boy has won good Master Camden's heart; and so, in due time, he proposes to remove him to Westminster School.

Let us look at the Shadow of his Mother, as she debates this question with her husband, at their frugal supper. "The boy must earn his living," says the bricklayer. "He is strong enough to be of help to me. He can mix the mortar; he will soon be able to carry the hod. Learning! stuff! he has learning enow, for all the good it will do him."--"Thomas Fowler," responds the mother, "if I wear my fingers to the bone, my boy shall never carry the hod. Master Camden, a good man, and a learned, will pay for his schooling. Shall we not give him his poor meals and his pallet-bed? Master Camden says he will make his way. I owe it to the memory of him who is gone, that Benjamin shall be a scholar, and perhaps a minister."--"Yes; and be persecuted for his opinions, as his father was. These are ticklish times, Margaret--the lowest are the safest. Ben is passionate, and obstinate, and will quarrel for a straw. Make him a scholar, and he becomes Papist or Puritan--the quiet way is not for the like of him. He shall be apprenticed to me, wife, and earn his daily bread safely and honestly." Night after night is the debate renewed. But the mother triumphs. Ben does go to Westminster School. He has hard fare at home; he has to endure many a taunt as he sits apart in the Abbey cloisters, intent upon his task. But Camden is his instructor and his friend. The bricklayer's boy fights his way to distinction.

Look again at the Shadow of that proud Mother as, after three or four anxious years, she hears of his advancement. He has an exhibition. He is to remove to Cambridge. Her Benjamin must be a bishop. Thomas Fowler is incredulous--and he is not generous: "When Benjamin leaves this roof he must shift for himself, wife." The mother drops one tear when her boy departs; the leathern purse which holds her painful savings is in Benjamin's pocket.

It is a summer night of 1590, when Benjamin Jonson walks into the poor house of Hartshorn-lane. He is travel-stained and weary. His jerkin is half hidden beneath a dirty cloak. That jerkin, which looked so smart in a mother's eyes when last they parted, is strangely shrunk--or, rather, has not the spare boy grown into a burly youth, although the boy's jerkin must still do service? The bricklayer demands his business; the wife falls upon his neck. And well may the bricklayer know him not. His face is "pimpled;" hard work and irregular living have left their marks upon him. The exhibition has been insufficient for his maintenance. His spirit has been sorely wounded. The scholar of sixteen thinks he should prefer the daily bread which is to be won by the labor of his hands, to the hunger for which pride has no present solace. Benjamin Jonson becomes a bricklayer.

And now, for two years, has the mother--her hopes wholly gone, her love only the same--to bear up under the burden of conflicting duties. The young man duly works at the most menial tasks of his business. He has won his way to handle a trowel; but he is not conformable in all things. "Wife," says Thomas Fowler, "that son of yours will never prosper. Can not he work--and can not he eat his meals--without a Greek book in his vest? This very noon must he seat himself, at dinner-hour, in the shade of the wall in Chancery-lane, on which he had been laboring; and then comes a reverend Bencher and begins discourse with him; and Ben shows him his book--and they talk as if they were equal. Margaret, he is too grand for me; he is above his trade."--"Shame on ye, husband! Does he not work, honestly and deftly? and will you grudge him his books?"--"He haunts the play-houses; he sits in the pit--and cracks nuts--and hisses or claps hands, in a way quite unbeseeming a bricklayer's apprentice. Margaret, I fear he will come to no good." One night there is a fearful quarrel. It is late when Benjamin returns home. In silence and darkness, the son and mother meet. She is resolved. "Benjamin, my son, my dear son, we will endure this life no longer. There is a sword; it was your grandfather's. A gentleman wore it; a gentleman shall still wear it. Go to the Low-Countries. Volunteers are called for. There is an expedition to Ostend. Take with you these few crowns, and God prosper you."

Another year, and Benjamin's campaign is ended. At the hearth in Hartshorn-lane sits Margaret Fowler--in solitude. There will be no more strife about her son. Death has settled the controversy. Margaret is very poor. Her trade is unprosperous; for the widow is defrauded by her servants. "Mother, there is my grandfather's sword--it has done service; and now, I will work for you."--"How, my son?"--"I will be a bricklayer again." We see the Shadow of the Mother, as she strives to make her son content. He has no longer the "lime and mortar" hands with which it was his after-fate to be reproached; but he bestows the master's eye upon his mother's workmen. Yet he has hours of leisure. There is a chamber in the old house now filled with learned books. He reads, and he writes, as his own pleasure dictates. "Mother," he one day says, "I wish to marry."--"Do so, my son; bring your wife home; we will dwell together." So a few years roll on. He and his wife weep

"Mary, the daughter of their youth."

But there is an event approaching which sets aside sorrow. "Daughter," says the ancient lady, "we must to the Rose Playhouse to-night. There is a new play to be acted, and that play is Benjamin's."--"Yes, mother, he has had divers moneys already. Not much, I wot, seeing the labor he has given to this 'Comedy of Humors'--five shillings, and ten shillings, and, once, a pound."--"No matter, daughter, he will be famous; I always knew he would be famous." A calamity clouds that fame. The play-writer has quarrels on every side. In the autumn of 1598, Philip Henslowe, the manager of "the Lord Admiral's men," writes thus to his son-in-law, Alleyn; "Since you were with me, I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly--that is, Gabriel; for he is slain in Hogsden Fields, by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." Twenty years after, the great dramatist, the laureat, thus relates the story to Drummond: "Being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which had hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his; for the which he was imprisoned and almost at the gallows." There is the proud Shadow of a Roman Matron hovering about his cell, in those hours when the gallows loomed darkly in the future.

The scholar and the poet has won his fame. Bricklayer no longer, Ben is the companion of the illustrious. Shakspeare hath "wit-combats" with him; Camden and Selden try his metal, in learned controversies; Raleigh, and Beaumont, and Donne, and Fletcher, exchange with him "words of subtle flame" at "The Mermaid." But a new trouble arises--James is come to the throne. Hear Jonson's account of a remarkable transaction: "He was delated by Sir James Murray to the King, for writing something against the Scots, in a play, 'Eastward Ho,' and voluntarily imprisoned himself, with Chapman and Marston, who had written it among them. The report was, that they should then have had their ears cut, and noses." They are at length released. We see the shadow of a banquet, which the poet gave to his friends in commemoration of his deliverance. There is a joyous company of immortals at that feast. There, too, is that loving and faithful mother. The wine-cups are flowing; there are song and jest, eloquence, and the passionate earnestness with which such friends speak when the heart is opened. But there is one, whose Shadow we now see, more passionate and more earnest than any of that company. She rises, with a full goblet in her hand: "Son, I drink to thee. Benjamin, my beloved son, thrice I drink to thee. See ye this paper; one grain of the subtle drug which it holds is death. Even as we now pledge each other in rich canary, would I have pledged thee in lusty strong poison, had thy sentence taken execution. Thy shame would have been my shame, and neither of us should have lived after it."

"She was no churl," says Benjamin.

LIGHT AND AIR.

Light and Air are two good things: two necessaries of existence to us animals, possessing eyes and lungs: two of the things prayed for by sanitary philosophers in the back streets of London; where, we fear, they might as well be crying for the moon.

Light and Air, then, being two good things, what happens when they come together? Spirit and water combined, says the toper, are two good things spoiled; and how do light and air mix? Pick out of Cheapside the busiest of men, and he will tell you that he loves the sky-blue in its proper place, making a sickly joke about his milk-jug. There is not a Scrub in the whole world who would not think it necessary to show pleasure--yes, and feel some indication of it--over sunset colors, when, by chance, he treads the fields upon a summer evening. We all look up at the stars, and feel that they would seem much less the confidential friends they really are, if they were shining down upon us with a rigid light. There is a beating human pulse which answers to our hearts in their incessant twinkling. And then the rainbow! Light that might pass down to us, and give us sight, but nothing more, gives sight and blesses it at once. Its touch converts the air into a region of delightful visions, ever changing, ever new. To reach us it must penetrate our atmosphere, and it is a fact that He who made the Universe, so made it that, in the whole range of Nature there is not one barren combination. Light must pass through the air; and, from a knowledge of the other laws of Nature, it might confidently be proclaimed, that, in addition to the useful purposes of each, and their most necessary action on each other, beauty and pleasure would be generated also by their union, to delight the creatures of this world.

It is not our design just now to talk about the nature of the atmosphere; to attempt any analysis of light, or even to mention its recondite mysteries. But in a plain way we propose to look into the reason of those changes made by light in the appearance of the sky, those every-day sights with which we are the most familiar.

Blue sky itself, for example. Why is the sky blue? To explain that, we must state a few preliminary facts concerning light, and beg pardon of any one whose wisdom may be outraged by the elementary character of our information. There are some among our readers, no doubt, who may find it useful. In the first place, then, we will begin with the erection of a pole upon a play-ground, and, like boys and girls, we will go out to play about it with an india-rubber ball. The pole being planted upright, is said to be planted at right angles to the surface of the ground. Now, if we climb the pole, and throw our ball down in the same line with it, it will run down the pole and strike the ground, and then jump back again by the same road into our fingers. The bouncing back is called in scientific phrase, Reflection; and so we may declare about our ball, that if it strike a plane surface at right angles, it is reflected immediately back upon the line it went by, or, as scientific people say, "the line of incidence." Now, let us walk off, and mount a wall at a short distance from the pole. We throw our ball so that it strikes the ground quite close to the spot at which the pole is planted in the earth, and we observe that the said ball no longer returns into our hand, but flies up without deviating to the right or left (in the same plane, says Science) beyond the pole, with exactly the same inclination toward the pole on one side, and the surface of the ground on the other, as we gave it when we sent it down. So if there were a wall on the other side of our pole, exactly as distant and as high as our own, and somebody should sit thereon directly opposite to us, the ball would shoot down from our fingers to the root of the pole, and then up from the pole into his hand. Spread a string on each side along the course the ball has taken, from wall to pole, and from pole to wall. The string on each side will make with the pole an equal angle: the angle to the pole, by which the ball went, is called, we said, the angle of incidence; the angle from the pole, by which it bounced off, is called the angle of reflection. Now, it is true not only of balls, but of all things that are reflected; of light, for example, reflected from a looking-glass, or a sheet of water, that "the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence."

The light that shines back to us from a sheet of water, has not penetrated through its substance, certainly. But now, let us be Tritons, or sea-nymphs, and let us live in a cool crystal grot under the waves. We don't live in the dark, unless we be unmitigated deep-sea Tritons. The deeper we go, the darker we find it. Why? Now, let us be absurd, and suppose that it is possible for light to be measured by the bushel. Ten bushels of light are poured down from the sun upon a certain bit of water; six of these, we will say, reflected from its surface, cause the glittering appearance, which is nothing to us Tritons down below. But light can pass through water; that is to say, water is a transparent substance; so the other four bushels soak down to illuminate the fishes. But this light, so soaking down, is by the water (and would be by any other transparent substance) absorbed, altered, partly converted into heat--when we understand exactly what Mr. Grove calls the Correlation of Physical Forces, we shall understand the why and how--we only know just now the fact, that all transparent bodies do absorb and use up light; so that the quantity of light which entered at the surface of our water suffers robbery, becoming less and less as if sinks lower down toward our coral caves.

Furthermore, beside reflection and absorption, there is one more thing that light suffers; and that we must understand before we can know properly why skies are blue, and stars are twinkling. That one thing more is called Refraction. A horse trots fairly over the stones, but slips the moment stones end, and he comes upon wood pavement. A ray of light travels straight as a dancing-master's back, so long as it is in air, or water, or glass, or any other "medium," as the books say, of a certain unvarying thinness or thickness, fineness or coarseness, or according to the school-word "density." But if a ray that has been traveling through warm and light air, suddenly plunges into air cold and heavy, it is put out of the way by such a circumstance, and in the moment of making such a change, it alters its direction. Still more, a ray of light that has been traveling in a straight line through air, is put out of its course on entering the denser medium of water; it is dislocated, refracted very much, alters its course, and then continues in a straight line on the new course, so long as the new medium continues. In the same way, a ray of light which travels through a medium that becomes denser and denser very gradually would be perpetually swerving from its straight path, and would travel on a curve. Our atmosphere is heaviest upon the surface of the earth, and becomes lighter and thinner as we rise; the ray, therefore, from a star comes to us after traveling in such a curve. But we see all objects in the direction of a perfectly straight line continued in the direction which the rays sent from them took at the moment of falling upon our sense of sight. Therefore we see all stars in a part of the heavens where they really are not; we see the sun before it really rises. Light entering a denser medium is refracted from, entering a lighter medium is refracted toward, a line drawn at right angles to its surface. Light entering a new medium at right angles--that is to say, not aslant--continues its own course unaltered.

There is but one more fact necessary to fill up the small measure of preliminary knowledge necessary for a general understanding of the phenomena produced by the mixing of light with air. Light in its perfect state is white, but the white light is a compound of other rays in due proportion, each ray being different in color and different in quality. So it takes place, because their qualities are different, that grass reflects the green ray and absorbs the rest, and therefore grass is green; while orange-peel reflects another ray, and swallows up the green and all the rest. These colors being in the light, not in the substance colored; in a dark room it is not merely a fact that we can not see red curtains and pictures; but the curtains really are not red, the paintings have no color in them, till the morning come, and artfully constructed surfaces once more in a fixed manner decompose the light. Beside the color of these rays, from which light is compounded, there are combined with them other subtle principles which act mysteriously upon matter. Upon the hard surface of a pebble there are changes that take place whenever a cloud floats before the sun. Never mind that now. The colored rays of which pure white light is compounded are usually said to be seven--Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red; and they may be technically remembered in their proper order by combining their initials into the barbarous word Vibgyor. These are called prismatic colors, because they were first separated by the passing of a ray of pure light through a prism. In that passage light is much refracted, and it happens that the contained rays all disagree with one another as to the extent to which they suffer themselves to be put out by a change of medium. Violet refracts most, and red least; the others stand between in the order in which they have just been named, the order in which you see them in the rainbow. So the rays after refraction come out in a state of dissension; all the rays--made refractory--having agreed to separate, because they are not of one mind, but of seven minds, about the degree to which they should be put out by the trouble they have gone through.

Now we have settled our preliminaries, we have got our principles; the next thing is to put them into practice. Let us first note what has been said of the absorption of light by transparent bodies. The air is one of the most transparent bodies known. On a clear day--when vapor (that is not air) does not mingle with our atmosphere--mechanical obstacles and the earth's figure form the only limits to our vision. You may see Cologne Cathedral from a mountain distant nearly sixty miles. Nevertheless, if the atmosphere had no absorbing power, only direct rays of the sun, or rays reflected from the substances about us, would be visible; the sky would be black, not blue; and sunset would abruptly pitch us into perfect night. The air, however, absorbs light, which becomes intermixed with its whole substance. Hold up your head, open your eyes widely, and stare at the noonday sun. You will soon shut your eyes and turn your head away; look at him in the evening or in the morning, and he will not blind you. Why? Remembering the earth to be a globe surrounded by an atmosphere, you will perceive that the sun's rays at noonday have to penetrate the simple thickness of the atmosphere, measured in a straight line upward from the earth; but in the evening or morning its beams fall aslant, and have to slip through a great deal of air before they reach us; suffering, therefore, a great deal of robbery; that is to say, having much light absorbed.

Now, why is the sky blue? Not only does the air absorb light; it reflects it also. The particles of air reflect, however, most especially the blue ray, while they let the red and his companions slip by. This constant reflection of the blue ray causes the whole air to appear blue; but what else does it cause? Let us consider. If air reflects or turns aside, or hustles out of its place the blue ray, suffering the rest to pass, it follows as a consequence that the more air a ray of light encounters, the more blue will it lose. The sun's rays in the morning and the evening falling aslant, as we have said, across a great breadth of our atmosphere, must lose their blue light to a terrible extent, and very likely reach us with the blue all gone, and red lord paramount. But so, in truth, the case is; and the same fact which explains the blueness of the atmosphere, explains the redness of the sunrise and the sunset. It will now easily be understood, also, why the blue color of the sky is deepest in the zenith, faintest when we look over the horizon; why the blue is at noon deeper than after mid-day; why it grows more intense as we ascend to higher elevations. From what we have already said, the reason of these things will come out with a very little thought. Again, in the example of our London fogs, &c., when in the upper portion of the dense mass the blue rays have been all refracted, there can penetrate only those other rays which make the lurid sky, with which we are familiar, or the genuine old yellow fog. Fog in moderation, the thin vapor on the open sea, and so forth, simply gives a lightness to the blue tint, or more plentiful, an absolute whiteness to the atmosphere.

Now let us see whether we are yet able to make out the philosophy of a fine autumn sunset. As the sun comes near the horizon, he and the air about him become red, because the light from that direction has been robbed of the blue rays in traversing horizontally so large a portion of the atmosphere. The sky in the zenith pales, for it has little but the absorbed or diffused light to exist upon. Presently, we see a redness in the east, quite opposite to the sun, and this redness increases till the sun sinks from our sight. In this case, the last rays of the sun that traverse the whole breadth of the atmosphere, reflected from the east, from vapors there, and more especially from clouds, come red to our eyes; no blue can be remaining in them. From the west, where the sun is setting, the rays come from the surrounding air, and from the clouds, variously colored; they lose their blue, but there remain the red, green, orange, yellow, and the purple rays; and some or all of these may make the tints that come to us, according to the state and nature of the clouds, the atmosphere, and other circumstances that may modify the process of refraction. The sun has set; it is immediately below the horizon, and its rays still dart through all our atmosphere, except that portion which is shielded from them by the intervening shadow of the earth. That shadow appears in the east, soon after sunset, in the shape of a calm blue arch, which rises gradually in the sky, immediately opposite to the part glorified by sunset colors. Over this arch the sky is red, with the rays not shut out by the round shadow of our ball. As the sun sinks, our shadow of course rises; and within it there can be only the diffused twilight, always blue. When this arch--this shadow of the earth--has risen almost to the zenith, and the sun is at some distance below the horizon, then the red color in the west becomes much more distinct and vivid; for the sun then shoots up thither its rays through a still larger quantity of intervening atmosphere; so that the redness grows as the sun sinks, until the shadow of the earth has covered all, and the stars--of which the brightest soon were visible--grow numerous upon the vault of heaven. When stars of the sixth magnitude are visible, then, astronomically speaking, twilight ends. The length of twilight will depend upon the number of rays of light that are reflected and dispersed, and that, again, will depend entirely on the atmosphere. Where there is much vapor, and the days are dull by reason of the quantity of kidnapped light, there compensation is made by the consequent increase of twilight. In the interior of Africa night follows immediately upon sunset. In summer the vapor rises to a great height, and pervades the atmosphere; the twilight then is longer than in winter, when the colder air contains less vapor, and the vapor it contains lies low.

Now, since the appearances at twilight depend on the condition of the sky, it follows that our weather-wisdom, drawn from such appearances, is based upon a philosophical foundation. When there is a blue sky, and after sunset a slight purple in the west, we have reason for expecting fine weather. After rain, detached clouds, colored red and tolerably bright, may rejoice those who anticipate a pic-nic party. If the twilight show a partiality for whitish yellow in its dress, we say that very likely there will be some rain next day; the more that whitish yellow spreads over the sky, the more the chance of water out of it. When the sun is brilliantly white, and sets in a white light, we think of storms; especially so when light high clouds that dull the whole sky become deeper near the horizon. When the color of the twilight is a grayish red, with portions of deep red passing into gray that hide the sun, then be prepared, we say, for wind and rain. The morning signs are different. When it is very red, we expect rain; a gray dawn means fine weather. The difference between a gray dawn and a gray twilight is this--in the morning, grayness depends usually upon low clouds, which melt before the rising sun; but in the evening grayness is caused by high clouds, which continue to grow denser through the night. But if in the morning there be so much vapor as to make a red dawn, it is most probable that thick clouds will be formed out of it in the course of the operations of the coming day.

Refraction of light has a good deal to do also with the twinkling of the stars; though there may go to the explanation of the phenomenon other principles which do not concern our present purpose. The air contains layers of different density, shifting over each other in currents. The fixed stars are, to our eyes, brilliant points of light; their rays broken in passing through these currents, exhibit an agitation which is not shown by the planets. The planets are not points to our sight, nor points to our telescopes; being much nearer, although really smaller, they are to our eyes of a decided, measurable size; so being in greater body, we at most could only see their edges scintillate; and this we can do sometimes through a telescope, but scarcely with the naked eye.

In rainbows, light is both refracted and reflected. You can only see a rainbow when the sun is low, your own position being between the rainbow and the sun. The rays of light refracted by the shower into their prismatic colors, are then reflected by the shower back into your eye, and so, from the principles we started with, it will be clear that while a thousand people may see under the same circumstances a rainbow of the same intensity, no two people see precisely the same object, but each man enjoys a rainbow to himself.

Of halos, and of lunar rainbows, of double suns, of the mirage, or any other extraordinary things developed by the play of light and air together, we did not intend to speak. Our discussion was confined to such an explanation of some every-day sights as may lend aid to contemplation sometimes of an autumnal evening, when

----"the soft hour Of walking comes: for him who lonely loves To seek the distant hills, and there converse With Nature."

Do you not think the man impenetrably deaf who, professing to converse with Nature, can not hear the tale which Nature is forever telling?

THE WIDOW OF COLOGNE.

In the year 1641, there lived in a narrow, obscure street of Cologne a poor woman named Marie Marianni. With an old female servant for her sole companion, she inhabited a small, tumble-down, two-storied house, which had but two windows in front. Nothing could well be more miserable than the furniture of this dark dwelling. Two worm-eaten four-post bedsteads, a large deal-press, two rickety tables, three or four old wooden chairs, and a few rusty kitchen utensils, formed the whole of its domestic inventory.

Marie Marianni, despite of the wrinkles which nearly seventy years had left on her face, still preserved the trace of former beauty. There was a grace in her appearance, and a dignity in her manner, which prepossessed strangers in her favor whenever they happened to meet her; but this was rarely. Living in the strictest retirement, and avoiding as much as possible all intercourse with her neighbors, she seldom went out except for the purpose of buying provisions. Her income consisted of a small pension, which she received every six months. In the street where she lived she was known by the name of "The Old Nun," and was regarded with considerable respect.

Marie Marianni usually lived in the room on the ground-floor, where she spent her time in needlework; and her old servant Bridget occupied the upper room, which served as a kitchen, and employed herself in spinning.

Thus lived these two old women in a state of complete isolation. In winter, however, in order to avoid the expense of keeping up two fires, Marie Marianni used to call down her domestic, and cause her to place her wheel in the chimney-corner, while she herself occupied a large old easy-chair at the opposite side. They would sometimes sit thus evening after evening without exchanging a single word.

One night, however, the mistress happened to be in a more communicative temper than usual, and addressing her servant, she said: "Well, Bridget, have you heard from your son?"

"No, madame, although the Frankfort post has come in."

"You see, Bridget, it is folly to reckon on the affection of one's children; you are not the only mother who has to complain of their ingratitude."

"But, madame, my Joseph is not ungrateful: he loves me, and if he has not written now, I am certain it is only because he has nothing to say. One must not be too hard upon young people."

"Not too hard, certainly; but we have a right to their submission and respect."

"For my part, dear lady, I am satisfied with possessing, as I do, my son's affection."

"I congratulate you, Bridget," said her mistress, with a deep sigh. "Alas! I am also a mother, and I ought to be a happy one. Three sons, possessing rank, fortune, glory; yet here I am, forgotten by them, in poverty, and considered importunate if I appeal to them for help. You are happy, Bridget, in having an obedient son--mine are hard and thankless!"

"Poor, dear lady, my Joseph loves me so fondly!"

"You cut me to the heart, Bridget: you little know what I have suffered. An unhappy mother, I have also been a wretched wife. After having lived unhappily together during several years, my husband died, the victim of an assassin. And whom, think you, did they accuse of instigating his murder? Me! In the presence of my children--ay, at the instance of my eldest son--I was prosecuted for this crime!"

"But doubtless, madame, you were acquitted?"

"Yes; and had I been a poor woman, without power, rank, or influence, my innocence would have been publicly declared. But having all these advantages, it suited my enemies' purpose to deprive me of them, so they banished me, and left me in the state in which I am!"

"Dear mistress!" said the old woman.

Marie Marianni hid her face in her handkerchief, and spoke no more during the remainder of the evening.

As the servant continued silently to turn her wheel, she revolved in her mind several circumstances connected with the "Old Nun." She had often surprised her reading parchments covered with seals of red wax, which, on Bridget's entrance, her mistress always hurriedly replaced in a small iron box.

One night Marie Marianni, while suffering from an attack of fever, cried out in a tone of unutterable horror: "No: I will not see him! Take away yon red robe--that man of blood and murder!"

These things troubled the simple mind of poor Bridget, yet she dared not speak of them to her usually haughty and reserved mistress.

On the next evening, as they were sitting silently at work, a knock was heard at the door.

"Who can it be at this hour?" said Marie Marianni.

"I can not think," replied her servant; "'tis now nine o'clock."

"Another knock! Go, Bridget, and see who it is, but open the door with precaution."

The servant took their solitary lamp in her hand, went to the door. She presently returned, ushering into the room Father Francis, a priest who lived in the city. He was a man of about fifty years old, whose hollow cheeks, sharp features, and piercing eyes wore a sinister and far from hallowed expression.

"To what, father, am I indebted for this late visit?" asked the old lady.

"To important tidings," replied the priest, "which I am come to communicate."

"Leave us, Bridget," said her mistress. The servant took an old iron lamp, and went upstairs to her fireless chamber.

"What have you to tell me?" asked Marie Marianni of her visitor.

"I have had news from France."

"Good news?"

"Some which may eventually prove so."

"The stars, then, have not deceived me!"

"What, madam!" said the priest, in a reproving tone; "do you attach any credit to this lying astrology? Believe me, it is a temptation of Satan which you ought to resist. Have you not enough of real misfortune without subjecting yourself to imaginary terrors?"

"If it be a weakness, father, it is one which I share in common with many great minds. Who can doubt the influence which the celestial bodies have on things terrestrial?"

"All vanity and error, daughter. How can an enlightened mind like yours persuade itself that events happen by aught save the will of God?"

"I will not now argue the point, father; tell me rather what are the news from France?"

"The nobles' discontent at the prime minister has reached its height. Henri d'Effiat, grand-equerry of France, and the king's favorite, has joined them, and drawn into the plot the Duke de Bouillon, and Monsieur, his majesty's brother. A treaty, which is upon the point of being secretly concluded with the king of Spain, has for its object peace, on condition of the cardinal's removal."

"Thank God!"

"However, madame, let us not be too confident; continue to act with prudence, and assume the appearance of perfect resignation. Frequent the church in which I minister, place yourself near the lower corner of the right-hand aisle, and I will forewarn you of my next visit."

"I will do so, father."

Resuming his large cloak, the priest departed, Bridget being summoned by her mistress to open the door.

From that time, during several months, the old lady repaired regularly each day to the church; she often saw Father Francis, but he never spoke, or gave her the desired signal. The unaccustomed daily exercise of walking to and from church, together with the "sickness of hope deferred," began to tell unfavorably on her health; she became subject to attacks of intermitting fever, and her large, bright eyes seemed each day to grow larger and brighter. One morning, in passing down the aisle, Father Francis for a moment bent his head toward her, and whispered, "All is lost!"

With a powerful effort Marie Marianni subdued all outward signs of the terrible emotion which these words caused her, and returned to her cheerless dwelling. In the evening Father Francis came to her. When they were alone, she asked, "Father, what has happened?"

"Monsieur de Cinq-Mars is arrested."

"And the Duke de Bouillon?"

"Fled."

"The treaty with the king of Spain?"

"At the moment it was signed at Madrid, the cunning cardinal received a copy of it."

"By whom was the plot discovered?"

"By a secret agent, who had wormed himself into it."

"My enemies, then, still triumph?"

"Richelieu is more powerful, and the king more subject to him than ever."

That same night the poor old woman was seized with a burning fever. In her delirium the phantom-man in red still pursued her, and her ravings were terrible to hear. Bridget, seated at her bedside, prayed for her; and at the end of a month she began slowly to recover. Borne down, however, by years, poverty, and misfortune, Marie Marianni felt that her end was approaching. Despite Father Francis's dissuasion, she again had recourse to the astrological tablets, on which were drawn, in black and red figures, the various houses of the sun, and of the star which presided over her nativity. On this occasion their omens were unfavorable; and rejecting all spiritual consolation--miserable in the present, and hopeless for the future--Marie Marianni expired in the beginning of July, 1642.

As soon as her death was known a magistrate of Cologne came to her house, in order to make an official entry of the names of the defunct and her heirs. Bridget could not tell either, she merely knew that her late mistress was a stranger.

Father Francis arrived. "I can tell you the names of her heirs," he said. "Write--the King of France; Monsieur the Duke of Orleans; Henrietta of France, queen of England."

"And what," asked the astounded magistrate, "was the name of the deceased?"

"The High and Mighty Princess Marie de Medicis, widow of Henri IV., and mother of the reigning king!"

MY NOVEL; OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.

[Continued from the October Number.]