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GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXXII.      February, 1848.      No. 2.

Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.

Anaïs Toudouze

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXXII.     PHILADELPHIA, February, 1848.     No. 2.

THE SCENE OF GRAY’S ELEGY, AND RESIDENCE OF THE PENNS OF PENNSYLVANIA.

———

BY R. BALMANNO.

———

The Manor of Stoke, with its magnificent mansion and picturesque park, is situate near the village of Stoke Pogeys, in the county of Buckingham, four miles north-west of Windsor.

About two miles distant from Stoke lies the village of Slough, rendered famous by the residence of the celebrated astronomer, Sir William Herschel, and a short way further, on a gentle slope continued the whole way from Stoke, stand the venerable towers of time-honored Eton, on the bank of the Thames, directly opposite, and looking up to the proud castle of the kings of England, unmatched in its lofty, commanding situation and rich scenery by that of any royal residence in Europe.

Stoke, anciently written Stoches, belonged, in the time of William the Conqueror, A. D. 1086, to William, son of Ansculf, of whom it was held by Walter de Stoke. Previous thereto, it was in part held by Siret, a vassal of Harold, and at the same time, a certain Stokeman, the vassal of Tubi, held another portion. Finally, in the year 1300, during the reign of King Edward the First, it received its present appellation by the intermarriage of Amicia de Stoke, the heiress, with Robert de Pogeys. Under the sovereignty of Edward the Third, 1346, John de Molines, originally of French extraction, and from the town of that name in Bourbonnais, married Margaret de Pogeys; and, in consequence of his eminent services, obtained license of the king to make a castle of his manor-house of Stoke Pogeys, fortify with stone walls embattled, and imparke the woods; also that it should be exempt from the authority of the marshal of the king’s household, or any of his officers; and in further testimony of the king’s favor, he had summons to Parliament among the barons of the realm.

During the wars of the rival Roses, the place was owned by Sir Robert Hungerford, commonly called Lord Moleyns, by reason of his marriage with Alianore, daughter of William, Lord Moleyns.

This Lord Robert, siding with the Lancasterians, or the Red Roses, upon the loss of the battle of Towton, fled to York, where King Henry the Sixth then was, and afterward with him into Scotland. He was attainted by the Parliament of Edward the Fourth; but the king took compassion on Alianore, his wife, and her children, committing her and them to the care of John, Lord Wenlock, to whom he had granted all her husband’s manors and lands, granting them a fitting support as long as her said husband, Lord Robert, should live. But the Lancasterians making head in the north, he “flew out” again, being the chief of those who were in the castle of the Percys, at Alnwick, with five or six hundred Frenchmen, and being taken prisoner at the battle of Hexham, he was beheaded at Newcastle on Tyne, but buried in the north aisle of the cathedral of Salisbury.

Lady Alianore, his widow, lies buried in the church of Stoke Pogeys; and her monument may still be seen, with an epitaph commencing thus:

Notwithstanding the grant to Lord Wenlock, Thomas, the son and heir of Lord Robert Hungerford, succeeded to the estate. For a time he sided with the famous Earl of Warwick, the king-maker, who took part with Edward the Fourth, but afterward “falling off,” and endeavoring for the restoration of King Henry the Sixth, was seized on, and tried for his life at Salisbury, before that diabolical tyrant, crook-back Duke of Gloucester, afterward Richard the Third, where he had judgment of the death of a traitor, and suffered accordingly the next day.

But during the reign of Henry the Seventh, in 1485, when the Red Roses became triumphant at the decisive battle of Bosworth, and these unnatural and bloody wars which had devastated England for nearly thirty years, being brought to a close, by the union of Henry with Elizabeth of York, representative of the White Roses, the attainder of Thomas, as well as that of his father, Lord Robert, being reversed in Parliament, his only child and heir, called Mary, succeeded to the estate.

Lady Mary married Edward, Lord Hastings, from whom the present Earl of Huntingdon is descended. She used the title of Lady Hungerford, Botreux, Molines, and Peverell. To this marriage Shakspeare alludes in the tragedy of King Henry the VI., Part 3, A. 4, Sc. 1, when he makes the Duke of Clarence say ironically,

Lord George Hungerford succeeding his father, was advanced to the title of Earl of Huntingdon by King Henry the Eighth, in 1529. He died the 24th of March, 1543, and lies buried in the chancel of Stoke Pogeys. Edward, his second son, was a warrior with King Henry the Eighth, and during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Mary, 1555, declared his testament, appointing his body to be buried at Stoke Pogeys, and directing his executors to build a chapel of stone, with an altar therein, adjoining the church or chancel, where the late Earl Huntingdon and his wife (his father and mother) lay buried; and that a tomb should be made, with their images carved in stone, appointing that a plate of copper, double gilt, should be made to represent his own image, of the size of life, in harness, (armor,) and a memorial in writing, with his arms, to be placed upright on the wall of the chapel, without any other tomb for him. He died without issue. Earl Henry was the last of the illustrious family of Huntingdon who possessed the manor and manor-house of Stoke; and the embarrassed state of his affairs compelled him to mortgage the estate to one Branthwait, a sergeant at law, in 1580, during which period it was occupied by Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton, the fine dancer, one of the celebrated favorites of Elizabeth, the lascivious daughter of King Henry the Eighth—a woman as fickle as profligate, as cruel and hard-hearted, so far as regarded her numerous paramours, as her brutal father was in respect to his wives.

This historical detail, gathered from Domesday Book, Dugdale, and other authorities, is narrated in consequence of its bearing upon some celebrated poems hereafter to be noticed, and is continued up to the present period for a like reason.

Sir Christopher Hatton died in 1591, and settled his estate on Sir William Newport, whose daughter became the second wife of Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, who purchased the estate of Stoke. After the dissolution of the Parliament by King Charles the First, in March, 1628-9, Sir Edward Coke being then greatly advanced in years, retired to his house at Stoke, where he spent the remainder of his days in a quiet retirement, universally respected and esteemed; and there, says his epitaph, crowned his pious life with a pious and Christian departure, on Wednesday the 3d day of September, A. D., 1634, and of his age 83; his last words, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done!”

Upon the death of Sir Edward Coke, the manor and estate of Stoke devolved to his son-in-law, Viscount Purbeck, elder brother of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who perished by the hand of the assassin, Felton.

Lord Purbeck, upon the death of his wife, daughter of Sir Edward Coke, married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Slingsby, by whom he had a son, Robert, which Robert, marrying the daughter and heir of Sir John Danvers, one of the judges who sat on the trial of King Charles the First, obtained a patent from Cromwell, Protector of the Commonwealth, to change his name to Danvers, alledging as the reasons for his so doing “the many disservices done to the commonwealth by the name of the family of Villiers.”

In 1657, Viscount Purbeck granted a lease of the manor and house of Stoke, to Sir Robert Gayer during his own life; and in the same year, his son, Robert Villiers, or Danvers, sold his reversionary interest in the estate to Sir R. Gayer for the sum of eight thousand five hundred and sixty-four pounds. The family of Gayers continued in possession until 1724, when the estate was sold for twelve thousand pounds to Edmund Halsey, Esq., M.P., who died in 1729, his daughter Anne married Sir Richard Temple, created Viscount Cobham, who survived him; and she resided at Stoke until her death in the year 1760.

The house and manor of Stoke were sold in the same year, by the representatives of Edmund Halsey, to the Honorable Thomas Penn, Lord Proprietary of the Province of Pennsylvania, the eldest surviving son of the Honorable William Penn, the celebrated founder and original proprietary of the province.

Upon the death of Thomas Penn, in 1775, the manor of Stoke, together with all his other estates, devolved upon his eldest surviving son, John, by the Right Honorable Lady Juliana, his wife, fourth daughter of the Earl of Pomfret.

In 1789, the ancient mansion of Stoke, appearing to Mr. Penn, after some years absence in America, to demand very extensive repairs, (chiefly from the destructive consequences of damp in the principal rooms,) it was judged advisable to take it down.

The style of its architecture was not of a kind the most likely to dissuade him from this undertaking. Most of the great buildings of Queen Elizabeth’s reign have a style peculiar to themselves, both in form and finishing, where, though much of the old Gothic is retained, and a great part of the new style is adopted, yet neither predominates, while both, thus indiscriminately blended, compose a fantastic species, hardly reducible to any class or name. One of its characteristics is the affectation of large and lofty windows, where, says Lord Bacon, “you shall have sometimes faire houses so full of glass, that one cannot tell where to become to be out of the sun.” A perfect specimen of this fantastic style, in complete repair, may be seen in Hardwick Hall, county of Derby, one of the many residences of that princely and amiable nobleman, the Duke of Devonshire, and a perfect contrast to it, at his other noble residence not many miles distant, in the same county, Chatsworth, “the Palace of the Peak.”

It is true that high antiquity alone gives, in the eye of taste, a continually increasing value to specimens of all such kinds of architecture; but beside that, the superiority of the new site chosen by Mr. Penn was manifest, the principal rooms of the old mansion at Stoke, where the windows admitted light from both the opposite sides, were instances, peculiarly exemplifying the remark of Lord Bacon, and countenancing the design to lessen the number of bad, and increase that of the good examples of architecture. But a wing of the ancient plan was preserved, and is still kept in repair, as a relic, harmonizing with the surrounding scenery, and forms with the rustic offices, and fruit-gardens annexed, the villa rustica and fructuaria of the place.

The new buildings, or, more properly speaking, Palace of Stoke, was begun by Mr. Penn immediately after his return from a long absence in Pennsylvania, and was covered-in in December, 1790. It is scarcely possible to conceive a finer site than that chosen by him for his new mansion, being on a commanding eminence, the windows of the principal front looking over a rich, variegated landscape toward the lofty towers of Windsor Castle, at a distance of four miles, which terminates the view in that direction; whilst about and around the site are abundance of magnificent aged oaks, elms, and beeches.

The poems of Thomas Gray, who was educated at Eton, and resided at Stoke, are perhaps better known, more read, more easily remembered, and more frequently quoted, than those of any other English poet. Where is the person who does not remember with feelings approaching to enthusiasm, the impressions made on his youthful fancy by the enchanting language of the “Elegy written in a Country Church-yard?” Who can ever forget the impressions with which he first read the narrative of the “hoary-headed swain,” and the deep emotion felt on perusing the pathetic epitaph, “graved on the stone, beneath yon aged thorn,” beginning—

That exquisite poem contains passages “grav’d” on the hearts of all who ever read it in youth, until they themselves become hoary-headed—and then, perhaps, remembered most.

But it is not the Elegy alone which makes an indelible impression on the youthful reader; equally imperishable are the lines on a distant prospect of Eton College.

And who can ever forget the Bard—

Or the lovely Ode on the Spring.

Or those sublime Odes—On The Progress of Poesy. Awake, Æolian lyre, awake; and the Descent of Odin:

Who can ever forget the pleasure experienced on the first perusal, and on every subsequent reading of these fascinating productions? They are such as all, imbued with even a moderate degree of taste and feeling, must respond to. But there is another poem of Gray’s, less read, perhaps, than these, but which, from its humor and arch playful style, is apt to make a strong and lasting impression on an enthusiastic juvenile mind. It opens so abruptly and oddly, that attention is bespoke from the first line. It is entitled “A Long Story.”

This poem, teeming with quaint humor, contains one hundred and forty-four lines, beside, as it says, “two thousand which are lost!”

Extreme admiration of the poems of Gray had been excited in the writer’s mind even when a schoolboy. In after years, whilst occupying chambers in the Temple, he first became aware that the scenery so exquisitely described in the Elegy, and the “ancient pile” of building, so graphically delineated in the Long Story, were both within a few hours’ ride of London, and adjoining each other.

Until about the year 1815 he had constantly supposed that the Country Church-yard was altogether an imaginary conception, and that the ancient mansion of the Huntingdons was far away, somewhere in the midland counties; but when fully aware of the true localities, he was almost mad with impatience, until, on a Saturday afternoon, he could get relieved from the turmoil of business, to fly to scenes hallowed by recollections of the halcyon days of youthful aspirations of hope, and love, and innocence—and sweetly and fresh do such reminiscences still float in his memory.

About the period in question, there was a club in London, formed of about twenty or thirty of the most aristocratic of the young nobility, possessed of more wealth than wisdom. They gave themselves the name of the Whip Club, because each member drove his own team of four horses. The chief tutor of these titled Jehu’s in the art and mystery of driving, was no less a personage than the celebrated Tom Moody, driver of the Windsor Coach, and by that crack coach it was intended to proceed as far as Slough, on the intended excursion to Stoke, and then turn off to the left; but as the Whip Club, at the period in question, attracted a large share of public attention in the metropolis, perhaps a short notice of it may be here permitted, as it has been long since defunct, and is never again likely to be revived, now that steam and iron horses have taken the road.

The vehicles, horses, trappings, and gearing, were the most elegant and expensive that money could command; and it was a rare thing to see upward of twenty such equipages, which, as well as the housings of the horses, were emblazoned with heraldric devices, and glittering all over with splendid silver and gold ornaments.

The open carriages were all filled with the loveliest of England’s lovely women, who generally congregated together at an early breakfast, or what with them was considered an early breakfast, between ten and eleven o’clock! The meet took place at the house of Lord Hawke, in Portman Square. His lordship was high admiral, or president, Sir Bellingham Graham, whipper-in—and courteously and cleverly did Sir Bellingham (or Bellinjim, as it is pronounced) perform his delicate duty. When each driver mounted his box, after handing in the ladies, it was wonderful to observe with what dexterity, ease, and order, all wheeled into line, when the leader, with a flourish of his long whip—being the signal for which all were watching—led off the splendid array.

It was a gay sight to witness the start, as they swept round the square—for the horses were one and all of pure blood, and unparalleled for beauty, symmetry, and speed.

To one unaccustomed to such a sight, it might appear somewhat dangerous. The fiery impatience of the horses—their pawing and champing, the tossing of their beautiful heads, and the swan-like curving of their glittering, sleek necks, until they were fairly formed into order—at which time they knew just as well as their owners that the play was going to begin. But it was perfectly delightful to observe the graceful manner in which each pair laid their small heads and ears together when fairly under way, beating time with their highly polished hoofs—pat, pat, pat, pat, as true as the most disciplined regiment marching to a soul-stirring quick step, or a troupe of well-trained ballet girls, bounding across the stage of the Italian Opera.

When fairly off and skimming along the road, it was, perhaps, as animating a show as London ever witnessed since its palmiest days of tilt and tournament. I say nothing of the ladies, their commingled charms, or gorgeous attire; I only noticed that during the gayety in the square, previous to starting, their recognition of each other, and the beaux of their acquaintance, there were plenty of

This celebrated club congregated every fortnight, during the gay season of May and June, and spent the day at the residence of one of their number, within twenty or thirty miles of London, returning in the evening, exactly in the order they had set out.

Master Moody, the driver and proprietor of the fast Windsor Coach, had, as said, been the tutor of these aristocratic charioteers, who placed themselves under his guardianship, and had been taught to handle “the ribbons” until declared perfect in the noble science. He had consequently imbibed much and many of the airs and graces, and manners of his pupils.

Being anxious to have a ride beside this great man, I was at Piccadilly long before he started, and by a pretty handsome douceur to his cad, had the supreme felicity of obtaining a seat on the box, and certainly was well repaid for the extra expense of sitting by Corinthian Tom.

He was a tall fellow, and had a severely serious face; was dressed in the extreme of driving fashion; wore delicate white kid gloves, and the tops of his highly-polished boots were white as the lily. In short, his whole “toggery” was faultless—a perfect out-and-outer. He was truly a great man, or appeared to fancy himself such—for he rarely condescended to exchange a word, except with an acquaintance, and even then, it was with a condescending, patronizing air; and he smiled as seldom as a Connecticut lawyer. Although sitting close by his side for twenty miles, not one word passed between us during the whole journey.

The nags driven by this proud fellow were as splendid as himself; finer cattle never flew over Epsom Downs, the Heath of Ascot, or Doncaster Course—pure bloods, every one of them, and such as might have served Guido as models for his famous fresco of the chariot of Apollo; but Guido’s steeds, although they are represented tearing away furiously, are lubberly drays, compared with the slim, graceful, fleet stags of Tom Moody.

When the cad gave the word—“all right,” Tom started them with his short, shrill “t’chit, t’chit,” and a crack of his two-fathom whip right over the ears of the leaders, as loud as the report of a pistol. They sprang forward with a maddening energy, almost terrifying; but the coach was hung and balanced with such precision, and the Windsor road kept in the finest order for royalty, there was no jumping or jolting, it glided along as smoothly as if it had been running on rails. A proud man was Master Moody; not so much of himself, perhaps, or of his glossy, broad-brimmed beaver, and broadcloth “upper Benjamin,” or the dashing silk tie around his neck, but of his beautiful nags—and he had reason, for there was not an equipage on the road, from the ducal chariot to the dandy tandem, to which he did not give the go-by like lightning.

The rapidity of the movement, and the beauty of the animals, produced an excitement sufficient to enable one to appreciate the rapture of the Arab, as he flies over the desert on his beloved barb, enjoying, feeling, exulting in liberty, sweet, intoxicating, unbounded liberty, with the whole wilderness for a home.

Some such feelings took possession of me, as the well-poised machine shot along. Quick as thought we threaded Kensington High street, skirted the wall of Lord Holland’s park, just catching, like the twinkle of a sunbeam, a glimpse of the antique turrets of that classic fane peeping through the trees, as we passed the centre avenue.

We speedily reached Hammersmith and Turnham Green, and then passed Sion House and park, the princely residence of the Duke of Northumberland, then dashed through the straggling old town of Brentford. The intervening fields and openings into the landscape affording enchanting prospects before entering on Hounslow Heath, when the horses having got warm, the driver gave them full head, and the vehicle attained a speed truly exhilarating.

The increased momentum, and the extensive prairie-like expanse of Hounslow Heath, would have realized in any enthusiastic mind, the feelings of the children of the desert.

This first excursion to Stoke was made during the month of May, when all nature is fresh and fair; the guelder-roses and lilacs being in full flower, and the hawthorn hedges were one sheet of milky fragrance, the air was almost intoxicating, owing to the concentrated perfumes arising from fruit orchards in full blossom, and the interminable succession of flower gardens opposite every house skirting that lovely road, the beauty of which few can conceive who have not been in England; but the fresh, pure air on the Heath, infused a new feeling, a realization of unalloyed happiness; we were rapidly hastening toward scenes for which the soul was yearning, and hope, bright, young hope, lent wings and a charm to every object, animate and inanimate.

The usual relay of fresh horses were in waiting at Cranburn Bridge, and the reeking bloods were instantly changed for others, not a whit less spirited than their released compeers. Away went Moody, and away went Moody’s fiery steeds. In a very short time we passed, at a few miles on the hither side of Slough, the “ivy-mantled tower” of Upton Church, which, but for one or two small, square openings in it, may be mistaken for a gigantic bush, or unshapely tree of evergreen ivy.

Arriving at Slough, I bade adieu to Master Moody; the forty feet telescope of Herschel, with its complicated frame-work and machinery, attracting only a few minutes attention. The road leading up to Stoke Green is one of those beautiful lanes so exquisitely described by Gilbert White, in his History of Selborne, or still more graphically portrayed by Miss Mitford, in her Tales of our Village. Stoke Green lies to the right of this lane, and at the distance of one or two fields further on, there is a stile in the corner of one of them, on the left, where a foot-path crosses diagonally. In going through a gap in the hedge, you catch the first peep of the spire of Stoke Church. After passing the field, you come to a narrow lane, overhung with hawthorns; it leads from Salt-Hill to the village of West-End Stoke. Keeping along the lane a short way, and passing through a small gate on the top of the bank, you at once enter the domain of Stoke Park, and are admitted to a full view of the church, which stands at a short distance, but almost immediately within the gate, are particularly struck by the appearance of a grand sarcophagus, erected by Mr. Penn to the memory of Gray, in the year 1779. It is a lofty structure, in the purest style of architecture; and a tolerable idea of it, and the surrounding scenery, may be obtained from the cut at the head of this article, which has been executed from a drawing made on the spot. The inscription and quotations following are on the several sides of the pedestal. It is needless to say they are from the Elegy, and Ode to Eton College—the latter poem being unquestionably written from this very spot; and Mr. Penn has exhibited the finest taste in their selection.

On the end facing Mr. Penn’s house—

On the side looking toward Windsor—

On the end facing Stoke Palace—

On the west side, looking toward the church-yard—

This noble monument is erected on a beautiful green mound, and is surrounded with flowers. It is protected by a deep trench, in the bottom of which is a palisade; but the inclosure may be entered by application at one of Mr. Penn’s pretty entrance lodges, which is close by. The prospects from this part of the park are surpassingly beautiful, particularly looking toward the “distant spires and antique towers” of Eton and Windsor.

It may be worth while here to remark, that the church and church-yard of Stoke is surrounded by Mr. Penn’s property, or more properly speaking his park.

Coming upon the beautiful monument quite unexpectedly, was not likely to diminish the enthusiasm previously entertained; and before proceeding to the church-yard, it was impossible to resist the impulse of making a rapid memorandum sketch of it. In after years, it was carefully and correctly drawn in all its aspects. Proceeding along “the churchway path” into the church-yard, where in reality “rests his head upon the lap of earth,” the tomb-stone of the admired and beloved poet was soon found. It is at the east end of the church, nearly under a window.

Persons of a cold temperament, and not imbued with the love of poetry, may perhaps smile when it is admitted, that the approach to that tomb was made with steps as slow and reverential as those of any devout Catholic approaching the shrine of his patron saint.

Long was it gazed upon, and frequently was the inscription read, and the following cut exhibits the coat of arms and inscriptions on the blue marble tabular stone, as they were carefully drawn and copied, that very evening:

It was a soft, balmy evening; “every leaf was at rest;” the deer in the park had betaken themselves to their favorite haunts, under the wide-spreading boughs of ancient oaks and elms, and were reposing in happy security.

The long continued twilight of England was gathering in, and I still lingered in the consecrated inclosure, fascinated with the unmistakable antiquity of the church, which, although small as compared with many others, is eminently romantic, and I cannot better describe the scene, and the feelings impressed at the moment, than in the words of one equally near as dear—

It may be proper to mention that the poem from which this is extracted, is descriptive of Haddon Hall, one of the most ancient and perfect specimens of the pure Gothic in England. The poem appeared in one of the English Annuals.

At peace with all the world, and filled with emotions of true and sincere gratitude to the Giver of all good, for the pure happiness then enjoyed, I sank down by the tomb-stone, overpowered with veneration, and breathed fervent thanks to Him who refuses not the offering of a humble and contrite heart.

This narrative is meant to be a faithful and honest representation of facts and circumstances that actually occurred, and it is firmly believed that none can stray into an ancient secluded country church-yard, during the decline of day, without deeply meditating on those who for ages have slept below, and where ALL must soon sleep, without feeling true devotion, and forming resolves for future and amended conduct.

Slowly quitting the church-yard, and approaching the elevated monument, now become almost sublime as the shades of evening rendered dim its classic outline, it was impossible to avoid lingering some time longer beside it, recalling various passages of the Elegy appropriate to the occasion; the landscape was indeed “glimmering on the sight,” and there was a “solemn stillness in the air,” well befitting the occasion; more particularly appropriate was that fine stanza, which, although written by Gray, is omitted in all editions of the Elegy except the one hereafter noticed, in where it was re-incorporated by the editor, [the present writer,] in consequence of a suggestion kindly offered in a letter from Granville Penn, Esq., then residing with his brother at Stoke Park.

The Elegy is undoubtedly the most popular poem in the English language; it was translated into that of every country in Europe, besides Latin and Greek. It has been more frequently, elaborately and expensively illustrated with pictorial embellishments. The autograph copy of it, in the poet’s small, neat hand, written on two small half sheets of paper, was sold last year for no less than one hundred pounds sterling; and the spirited purchaser was most appropriately the proprietor of Stoke Park, Granville John Penn, Esq., who at the same sale gave forty-five pounds for the autograph copy of The Long Story, and one hundred and five pounds for the Odes; whilst another gentleman gave forty pounds for two short poems and a letter from the illustrious poet on the death of his father.

The truthfulness of the pictures presented to the imagination in the Elegy could not be denied, for there, on the very spot where, beyond all question, it was composed, and after a lapse of nearly one hundred years, the images which impressed the mind of the inspired poet came fresh at every turn. It is true the curfew did not toll, but the “lowing herd” were as distinctly audible as the beetle wheeling his droning flight. The yew tree’s shade—that identical tree, to which, to a moral certainty, the poet had reference—is represented in the cut, in the corner of the inclosure, as distinctly as the smallness of the scale admitted, underneath its shade the “turf lies in many a mouldering heap,” and the “rugged elms” are outside the inclosure, but their outstretched arms overspread many a “narrow cell and frail memorial,” where the “rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep,” and where also “their name and years are spelt by th’ unlettered muse.” A singular error in spelling the name of one of those humble persons, was however committed by the poet himself in his “Long Story,” very pardonable in him, however, as the party was then alive; but that the error should have been perpetuated in ALL EDITIONS save one, down to that entitled “The Eton,” being printed there, and edited by a reverend clergyman resident in the college, is somewhat singular; moreover the second edition of the Eton Gray appeared this very year, and the error remains, although the name is correctly given on the grave-stone. The excepted edition, in which alone it is correctly given, was published in 1821, and edited by the present writer for his friend Mr. John Sharpe. The circumstance will be noticed presently.

The Elegy of Gray was evidently written under the influence of strong feeling, and vivid impressions of the beautiful in the scenery around him, and when his sensitive mind was overspread with melancholy, in consequence of the death of his young, amiable and accomplished friend West, to whom, in June, 1742, he addressed his lovely Ode to Spring, which was written at Stoke; but before it reached his friend he was numbered with the dead! So true was the friendship subsisting between them, that the poet of Stoke was overpowered with a melancholy which, although subdued, lasted during a great part of his life.

The scenes amid which the Elegy was composed were well adapted to soothe and cherish that contemplative sadness which, when the wounds of grief are healing, it is a luxury to indulge, and that the poet did indulge them is self-evident in many a line.

In returning to Stoke Green to spend the night, some of the rustic peasantry were wending their way down the lane to the same place, but none of these simple people, although questioned, could tell aught of him whose fame and works had induced the pilgrimage to Stoke; neither did better success attend any succeeding inquiry at the village. So universally true is that scriptural saying, like ALL the sayings of Him who uttered it, that a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house.

Retiring to rest early, with a full determination to do that which had often been resolved but never accomplished, that is, to rise with the dawn; the resolution had nearly defeated the purpose, inasmuch as the mind being surcharged with the past and the expected, there was little inclination to sleep until after midnight. But a full and fixed determination of the will overcomes greater difficulties, and the first streak of light at break of day found me up and dressed, and of a truth

The dawn was most lovely, and the perfume from the hawthorns delicious; every thing indicated a beautiful day. The sarcophagus stands on the most elevated spot, and there, where probably in days long past the poet had watched the rising of the sun, did I, a humble pilgrim at his shrine, await the same sublime spectacle.

As if to gratify a long cherished desire, the sun did rise with a splendor impossible to be exceeded, and the following lines, by an anonymous author, immediately recurred to memory:

To witness the break of day in the country is indeed a luxury to which the inhabitants of cities are strangers. As the sun rose from the horizon, his increasing light brought into view myriads of dew-drops on every bud and blossom, which glittered and shone like diamonds. The sky-larks began to rise from their grassy beds among the daisies, ascending in circles to the clouds, and caroling a music which is almost heavenly to hear. The deer also were getting up from their shadowy lair under the trees, and the young fawns sprung away and took to flight as I passed a herd, under a clump of beeches, in order to obtain a view of the ancient mansion. In approaching it, a sound, familiar indeed but far from musical, struck the ear, and added another proof and a fresh charm to the fidelity of the picture drawn by the poet. The swallows were merrily “twittering” about the gable-ends, and it did the heart good to stand watching the probable successors of those active little visiters, whose predecessors had possibly attracted the notice of the bard. It is well known that these birds, like the orchard oriole, return year after year to the same house, and haunt where they had previously reared their young.^[2]

A strong and perhaps natural desire to inspect the interior of all that remained of the ancient mansion of the Huntingdons and Hattons was defeated, inasmuch as it was found barricaded. Imagination had been busy for many a year, in respect to its great hall and gallery, its rich windows “and passages that lead to nothing;” but as access to the interior was denied, the sketch-book was put in requisition, and an accurate view soon secured.

Observing at some distance, through a vista among the trees, a lofty pillar with a statue on its summit, and proceeding thither, it was found to be another of those splendid ornaments with which the taste and liberality of the proprietor had adorned his park, being erected to the memory of Sir Edward Coke, whose statue it was which surmounted the capital. Whilst engaged in sketching this truly classic object, a gentleman approached, who introduced himself as Mr. Osborne, the superintendent of the demesne. He expressed pleasure at seeing the sketches, and politely offered every facility for making such, but hinted that Mr. Penn had scruples, and very proper ones, about strangers approaching too near the house on the Sabbath day, to make sketches of objects in its vicinity.

Mr. Osborne’s offer was courteously made, and the consequence was that many visits to Stoke afterward took place, and the whole of the interesting scenery carefully sketched. He kindly pointed out all that was most worthy of attention about the estate and neighborhood, and made tender of his company to visit West-End, and show the house which Gray, and his mother and aunt had for many years occupied. The proprietor he said was Captain Salter, in whose family it had remained for a great many generations. Latterly the house has been purchased, enlarged, and put into complete repair by Mr. Granville John Penn, the present proprietor, nephew of John Penn, Esq., who died in June, 1834. After “a hasty” breakfast at Stoke Green, the church-yard was again visited, and there was not a grave-stone in it which was not examined and read. The error formerly alluded to was immediately detected. The passages in the Long Story, describing the mock trial at the “Great House,” before Lady Cobham, may be worth transcribing.

Finding on the stone alluded to, that it was to the memory of Mrs. Ann Tyacke, who died in 1753, it occurred that this was the Styack of the poem, where a foot-note in a copy then and there consulted, stated her to have been the housekeeper; and on inquiring of Mr. Osborne, he confirmed the conjecture. Two other foot-notes state Squib to have been groom of the chamber, and that Groom was steward; but finding another head-stone (both are represented in the large wood-cut, although not exactly in the situations they occupy in the church-yard) close to that of Mrs. Tyacke, to the memory of William Groom, who died 1751, it appears to offer evidence that Gray mistook the name of the one for the office of the other. The Eton edition has not a single foot-note from beginning to end of the volume. It is dedicated to Mr. Granville John Penn, and his “kind assistance during the progress of the work” acknowledged, both in its illustrations, and in the biographical sketch, notwithstanding which “assistance,” the error of the house-keeper’s name is continued; and amongst the wood-cut illustrations, there is one entitled (both in the list and on the cut) “Stoke Church, east end, with tablet to Gray,” when, in fact, it represents the tomb-stone at the end of the church, under which Gray and his mother are interred. The tablet to Gray is quite another thing, that was lately inserted in the wall of the church; but by some extraordinary blunder it records his death as having taken place on the 1st of August, while on the sarcophagus it is stated to have occurred on the 30th of July. Neither the one nor the other is correct. The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1771, and the Annual Register for the same year, as well as Mathias’ Life, 2 vols. 4to., 1814, all concur in giving it as having taken place on the 31st. The Etonian edition has it the 30th. After a considerable time spent in the church-yard, the hour of public worship drew near, the aged sexton appeared, opened the doors, and began to toll the bell—that same ancient bell which, century after century, had “rung in” generation after generation, and tolled at their funerals. It is difficult to realize the feelings excited on entering a sacred edifice of very ancient date, particularly if it is in the country, secluded amongst aged trees, looking as old as itself; and in walking over the stone floor, which, although so seldom trodden, is worn away into something like channels; in sitting in the same antique, and curiously carved, black oaken pews, which had been sat on by races of men who had occupied the same seats hundreds of years long past; but the effect is greatly increased on viewing the effigies of the mighty dead, lying on their marble beds, in long and low niches in the walls, some with the palms of their hands pressed together and pointing upward, as if in the act of supplication; and others grasping their swords, and having their legs crossed, indicating that they had fought for the cross in the Holy Land. Such a church, and such objects around, fill the mind with true devotion. The sublime words of Milton work out the picture to perfection.

It was gratifying and affecting to witness the piety, humility, and devotion of the congregation as they entered and took their seats in silence, long before the venerable clergyman entered the church; there was something exceedingly touching in the profound silence that reigned throughout the congregation, and induced one to think highly of that rule amongst those excellent people, who with great propriety are termed Friends. Public worship was attended both in the morning and afternoon, and I returned to London, feeling myself a much better man than when I left it, with a full determination to revisit a place where so much pleasure had been received. It was nearly three months before the resolve was carried into effect; but a second excursion was made in August, and Mr. Osborne was kind enough to show the house at West-End, together with the celebrated Burnham beeches, amongst which were several “which wreathed their old fantastic roots so high,” evidently the originals alluded to in the Elegy. They are scarcely a mile from West-End, and are approached through another of those sweet green lanes with which the neighborhood abounds. They are part of the original forest. The spot was one of Gray’s favorite haunts; and it would be difficult to find one better fitted for a lover of nature, and a contemplative mind. Late in the autumn an invitation was received from Mr. Osborne to spend a day or two with him; but it was not until the beginning of November that advantage could be taken of it. Arriving at his house late in the afternoon, his servant informed me he had been suddenly called away to the Isle of Portland, in Dorsetshire, where Mr. Penn was erecting a castle. She also apologized for Mrs. Osborne’s inability to receive company, in consequence of “a particular circumstance,” which circumstance she blushingly acknowledged was the birth of a fine boy the night before. There was no resource, therefore, but to walk down either to Stoke Green, or to Salt-Hill, where there are two well-known taverns. Before proceeding, however, the church-yard, almost of necessity, must be visited; and although in a direct line, it was not far from Mr. Osborne’s house, a considerable circuit had to be made to get into the inclosure. The evening was particularly still—you could have heard a leaf fall; the twilight was just setting in, and a haze, or fog, coming on, but the spot was soon reached; and whilst kneeling, engaged, like Old Mortality, in plucking some weeds and long grass, which had sprung up about the tomb since the last visit, a slight sound—a very gentle rustle—struck the ear. I supposed it to be the ivy on the church-wall, but the next instant it was followed by a movement—something very near was certainly approaching. On looking up, it is impossible to describe with what mixed feelings of astonishment, apprehension, and awe, I beheld coming from a corner of the church-yard, (where there was no ingress through the brick wall,) and directly toward the spot where I knelt, the figure of a tall, majestic lady, dressed in a black velvet pelisse, black velvet hat, surmounted by a plume of black ostrich feathers. She was stepping slowly toward me, over the graves. It would be useless to deny that fear fixed me to the spot on beholding the expression of her very serious face, and her eyes firmly fixed on mine.

Appalled by her sudden appearance, it seemed as if she had just risen from the grave, dressed in a funeral pall; for I was facing toward that corner of the enclosure from which she was coming, and feeling certain no human being was there one minute before, I was breathless with apprehension, and glad to rest one arm on the tomb-stone until she came close up to me.

With a graceful inclination of the head, she addressed me.

“Mr. B——, I believe?”

“Yes, madam, that is my name.”

“And you came down to visit Mr. Osborne, who has been called away to Portland.”

I breathed more freely as I admitted it.

“It happens,” she continued, “to be inconvenient for Mrs. Osborne to receive you, and as you came by invitation from her husband, if you will accept a night’s lodging from me, I am enabled to offer it. I am Mr. Penn’s housekeeper, and none of the family are at home.”

Most joyfully was the invitation accepted; my mind was relieved from a very unpleasant load of apprehension—but the end was not yet! She began to lead the way over the graves, exactly toward the spot from whence she had so suddenly and mysteriously appeared; after proceeding a few steps, I ventured to say—

“Pray, madam, may I be allowed to inquire where you are leading to? I can see no egress in that direction, unless it be into an open grave or under a tomb-stone.”

“Oh, you will find that out presently,” replied the lady, transfixing me with a glance of her bright blue eyes, and I thought I could detect a rather equivocal expression about the corners of her beautiful mouth. This was not very encouraging, and not much liked, but she was a woman, and a lovely one, too much so by half to be a Banshee—I was on my guard, however, and ready, but the fog became so thick it was impossible to see three steps before us; in fact, it rolled over the church-yard wall in clouds. The lady linked her arm in mine, to prevent herself from stumbling, holding up her dress with the other hand, as the long dank grass was wetting it. At last we arrived in the very corner of the church-yard, she still keeping a firm hold of my arm.

“In Heaven’s name, madam, what do you mean by leading me into this corner?”

“Oh, you are afraid, I see; but wait a moment.”

On saying which, I observed her to take something bright from her girdle, which apprehension converted into a stiletto or dirk, and such is the force of self-preservation, that I was on the point of tripping her up and throwing her on her back. But thrusting the supposed dirk against the wall—presto—open sesame—the wall gave way, and she drew me through a doorway. This was done so quickly it absolutely seemed magic. For an instant I thought of dropping her arm—indeed I should have done so, and retreated back through the door, but she held my arm tight, and I almost quaked, for I thought she had dragged me into a secret vault, the manœuvre was performed so adroitly. The drifting cold fog, however, soon made it plain we were in no vault, but the open park. In short, it was a door in the wall, flush with the bricks, and painted so exactly like them, it was impossible for a stranger to discover it. It was Mr. Penn’s private entrance, and saved the family a walk of some distance. A narrow green walk, not previously remarked, led from the door to the west end of the church.

The housekeeper of a nobleman or gentleman of wealth, in England, generally enjoys an enviable situation. Intrusted with much that is valuable, she is generally a person of the highest consideration and respect, and seldom fails to acquire the elevated manners and refined address of her superiors. The lady in question was exactly one of this description, well educated, and well read; a magnificent library was at her command, and having much time, and what is better, fine taste, she had profited by it. Never was an evening passed in greater comfort, or with a more agreeable companion. After partaking of that most exhilarating of all beverages, the pure hyson, we began to chat with almost the same freedom as though we had been long acquainted. During a pause in the conversation, after looking in my face a moment, she said—

“Will you answer me one question?”

“Most certainly, any thing, you choose to ask.”

“But will you answer it honestly and truly?”

“Do not doubt it.”

“Well, then, tell me, were you not most horribly afraid when you saw me coming toward you in the church-yard?”

“I do frankly confess, madam, I was horribly afraid, and further, I firmly believe I should have taken to my heels, had you not been a very beautiful woman!”

Before the sentence was well finished her laughter was irrepressible.

“I knew it, I saw it, I intended it,” said she, laughing so heartily that the tears sprung out of her beautiful eyes, and she was obliged to use her handkerchief to wipe them away.

“And do you feel no compunction for scaring a poor fellow half out of his wits?”

“None whatever,” replied she gayly. “What could you expect when prowling amongst the graves in a church-yard so lone and solitary, like a goule, on a damp November night? I saw you from Mr. Osborne’s going toward it, and determined to startle you—and I think I succeeded pretty effectually.”

“You did, and had very nearly met with your reward, for when in the corner of that church-yard you pulled the key from your girdle, fully believing you to be the Evil One, I was on the point of strangling you.”

Much laughter at my expense ensued, for the lady lacked neither wit nor humor, and the evening flew faster than desired. On retiring, a man servant conducted me to an apartment on the upper floor of the mansion, and sleep soon came and soon went, for an innumerable number of rats and mice were careering all over the bed! and I felt them sniffing about my nose and mouth; I sprang bolt upright, striking right and left like a madman. This sent them pattering all about the room, and dreading that I might find myself minus a nose or an ear before morning, I groped all around the room for a bell, but could find none; proceeding into the corridor and standing on tip-toe, bell-wires were soon found, and soon set a ringing; watching at the top of the very long staircase, a light was at last seen ascending, borne in the hand of a very fat man, who proved to be the butler; he had nothing on but his shirt, and a huge pair of red plush, which enveloped his nether bulk. Puffing with the exertion of ascending so many stairs, he at last saw me, still more lightly clothed than himself, and inquired what I wanted?

“Have you got a cat about the house?”

“No, sir, we have no cats, they destroy the young pheasants.”

“A dog, then?”

“No dog, sir, on account of the deer.”

“Then tell the housekeeper there are ten thousand rats and twenty thousand mice in the room I occupy!”

As he descended the stair he was heard mumbling, “cats!”—“dogs!”—“rats!”—“mice!” and chuckling ready to burst his fat sides.

After long waiting, the reflection of light on his red plush smalls (greats would better describe them) flashed up like a streak of lightning, and puffing harder than before, told me if I would follow him down stairs, he had orders to show me to another room.

Gathering up the articles of my dress over my arm, we descended, and I was shown into a room of almost regal splendor. The lofty bedstead had a canopy, terminating in a gilded coronet, and the ample hangings were of rich Venetian crimson velvet, trimmed and festooned “about, around and underneath.” The ascent to this unusually lofty bed was by a flight of superb steps, covered with rich embossed velvet. Out of the royal palaces I had never seen such a bed.

In consequence of having stood so long undressed on the marble floor at the top of the stairs, shivering with cold, the magnificent bed, on getting into it, was found comfortable beyond expression. It felt as if it would never cease yielding under the pressure; it sunk down, down, down—there appeared no stop to its declension; and then its delicious warmth—what a luxury to a shivering man! Hugging myself under the idea of a glorious night’s rest, and composing myself in the easiest possible position, it was more desirable to lay awake in such full enjoyment, than to sleep—sleep had lost all its charms. I was in the bed of beds—the celestial!

After thus laying about twenty minutes, enjoying perfect bliss, a sensation of some uneasiness began slowly to manifest itself, which induced a change of position; but the change did not relieve the uncomfortable feeling. It would be difficult to describe it, but it increased every moment, until at last it seemed as if the points of a hundred thousand fine needles were puncturing every pore. This was borne with great resignation and equanimity for some time, expecting it would go off; but the stinging sensation increased, and finally became intolerable; the celestial bed became one of infernal torture. I tossed, and dashed, and threw about my limbs in all directions, and almost bellowed like a mad bull.

What to do to relieve the torment I knew not. To ask for another bed was out of the question, and to attempt to sleep on thorns—thorns! they would have been thought a luxury to this of lying enduring the pains of the doomed. After long endurance of the pain, and in racking my brains considering what was best to be done, the intolerable sensations began by degrees to subside and grow less and less; but the heat, although nearly insupportable, was more easily endured. That horrible night was a long one—and long will it be before it is forgotten.

Coming down in the morning, expecting to find the lady all smiles and graces, I was surprised and hurt to find she received me rather coldly, and with averted head; but when she could no longer avoid turning round, never, in the whole course of my life, was I more astonished at the change she had undergone. It was a total, a radical change—she was hardly to be recognized—and it was scarcely possible to believe she was the lovely woman of the last night. Not that her splendid figure was altered—in fact, an elegant morning-dress rather tended to improve and set-off her full and almost voluptuous contour, and her soft, sweet voice was equally musical; but her face—the charms of her lovely face were vanished and gone!

Every one will admit that the nose is a most important, nay, a very prominent feature in female beauty. It is indispensible that a belle should have a beautiful nose; in fact, it is a question whether a woman without an eye would not be preferable to one with—but I anticipate.

“I see your surprise, sir,” said she, with evident chagrin, “but it is all owing to you.”

“To me, madam! I presume you allude to the altered appearance of your face, but I cannot conceive what I can have had to do with the change.”

In brief, her beautiful nose was all over as red as scarlet, particularly the point of it, which exactly resembled a large red cherry, or ripe Siberian crab-apple. Now just think of it—a very fair woman with a blood-red nose! Faugh! it is enough to sicken the most devoted admirer of the sex. Suppose any gentleman going to be married, and full of love and admiration, should, on going to the house of his beloved bride on the appointed morning, to take her to church, humming to himself that sweet song, “She Wove a Wreath of Roses,” finds her beautiful nose become a big rosy nosegay—would he not be apt to suppose she had over night been making pretty free sacrifices, not to the little god of love, but to jolly Bacchus? I did not do my belle such an injustice—and yet what could I think?

“How do you make out that I had any thing to do with such an important alteration, madam.”

“O, as easy as it is true. Did not your wo-begone terrors in the church-yard throw me into immoderate fits of laughter, as you well know? And did not your adventures, after you retired, when reported to me, throw me all but into convulsions—the more I thought, the more I laughed, until it brought on a nervous headache so intense, it felt as if my head would have split? To relieve so distressing a pain, I took a bottle of eau de cologne to bed with me, and pulling out the stopper, propped it up by the pillow, right under my nose. I quite forgot it, and fell asleep with the bottle in that position.”

“Ah!” said I, “I suspected the bottle had something to do with it.”

“Quite true, quite true—but not the bottle you wickedly insinuate. How long I slept I know not, it must have been a long time; when I awoke, I was surprised to find my shoulder cold and wet—and then I recollected the bottle of cologne; but what was my horror, on getting up, to behold my face in this frightful condition, you may easily imagine.”

Poor, dear lady, if she laughed heartily at the scare she gave me in the church-yard, I now had my revenge, full and ample—for I could not refrain from laughing outright every time I looked in her face; and laughter, when it is hearty and hilarious, is catching, almost as much as yawning; and I fancy few will dispute how potent, how Mesmeric, or magnetic the effect of an outstretched arm and wide gaping oscitation is. I declare, I caught myself gaping the other night on seeing my wife’s white cat stretch herself on the rug, and yawn.

“I really should feel obliged if you would be polite enough to keep your eye off my face,” said the lady.

Now it need hardly be remarked, that when any thing is the matter with a person’s face, be it a wall-eye, a squint, a cancer, very bad teeth, or any such disfigurement or malady, it is impossible to look at any other spot—it is sure to fix your gaze, you can look at no other part; you cannot keep your eye off it, unless you are more generous, or better bred than most men.

“I really should feel obliged if you would be polite enough to keep your eye off my nose; it puts me out of countenance,” said the fair one. She said this half earnest, half jest; and I obliged her, by directing my looks to her taper fingers and white hands—and the conversation proceeded with the breakfast.

“May I inquire how you rested, after your escape from the ten thousand rats, and twenty thousand mice, which attacked you before you changed your room?”

“Do you ask the question seriously?”

“Certainly I do.”

“Why, then, to use a homely but a very expressive phrase, it was out of the frying-pan into the fire.”

“Mercy on us! how can that be; you had what is considered the best bed in the house.”

“O, I dare say—no doubt, the softest I ever lay in; but instead of ten thousand rats, and twenty thousand mice, I had not been in it fifteen minutes ere a hundred and twenty thousand hornets, wasps, scorpions, and centipedes, two or three thousand hedge-hogs, and as many porcupines, seemed to be full drive at me; and had I not soon been relieved by perspiration, I should assuredly have gone mad, and been in bedlam. Nervous headache! Why, madam, it would have been considered paradise, compared with the purgatory you inflicted on me.”

Her eyes sparkled with glee—and she began to laugh joyously; but soon checking herself, and assuming a sort of mock sympathy, said,

“I am very sorry—very sorry, indeed, that you should have found your bed so like the love of some men, rather hot to hold.”

On inquiring whether the grand coroneted bed, which had been as a hot gridiron to me, was intended for any particular person, she informed me it was for a Russian nobleman, Baron Nicholay, a much respected friend of Mr. Penn’s, who sometimes visited Stoke, and who, being used to a bed of down in the cold climate of his own country, Mr. Penn, with his characteristic kindness and attention, had it prepared for the baron’s especial comfort. She added that the reason why Mr. Penn had all his life remained a bachelor, was in consequence of an early attachment which he had formed for the baron’s sister; that they were to have been married, but in driving the lady in a drouschky, or sledge, on the ice of the Neva, at St. Petersburg, by some fatality the ice gave way, and notwithstanding the most strenuous exertions of her lover, and the servant who stood behind the sled, the lady, by the force of the current, was swept away under the ice, and never afterward seen. That this shocking accident had such effect on Mr. Penn’s mind, as well it might, he never could think of any other woman, but remained true and constant to his first love, mourning her tragic end all his life.

This was exactly the case with that most amiable and gifted man, the late Sir Thomas Lawrence, who being engaged and about to be married to a daughter of the celebrated Mrs. Siddons, the young lady was suddenly snatched from him by a rapid consumption; and Sir Thomas remained faithful to her beloved memory, wearing mourning during his life, and ever after used black wax in sealing his letters, as the writer can prove by many, many received from him during a series of years until his lamented death.

On asking my intelligent companion if she knew any particulars respecting Gray, she replied she did know a great deal regarding him; that Mr. Penn idolized his memory, and had made collections respecting him and the personages mentioned in the Long Story. At my pressing solicitation she was good enough to say she would write out all the particulars—a promise which she faithfully kept; and they may hereafter appear in some shape.

The morning proving foggy and damp, the time (instead of going to church) was passed in the library—a magnificent room, nearly two hundred feet long, extending the whole length of the building, and filled with books from floor to ceiling.

In one of the principal rooms, mounted upon a pedestal, there is a large piece of the identical tree under the shade of which Mr. Penn’s celebrated ancestor, William, signed his treaty with the Indians, constituting him Lord Proprietary of what was afterward, and what will ever be, Pennsylvania. The piece of wood is part of a large limb, about five feet long. The tree was blown down in 1812, and the portion in question was transmitted by Dr. Rush to Mr. Penn, who had it varnished in its original state, and a brass plate affixed to it, with an inscription.

The sun broke through the fog about twelve o’clock, and had as cheering an effect on the landscape, as it almost invariably has on the mind. In the afternoon, after a most delightful day spent with the fair housekeeper, it became time to think of returning to London, and as the distance would be much lessened by proceeding through Mr. Penn’s grounds, and going down to Salt-Hill instead of Slough, the lady offered to accompany me to the extent of the shrubberies, and point out the way. These enchanting shrubberies are adorned with busts of the Roman and English poets, placed on antique terms, along the well-kept, smooth gravel-walks, which wind about in many a serpentine direction through the grounds. There are appropriate quotations from the works of the different bards, placed on the front of each terminus. The bust of Gray, is placed under an ancient wide-spreading oak, with this inscription:

There is an elegant small building, inscribed “The Temple of Fancy,” in which a bust of the immortal Shakspeare is the only ornament. It is on a small knoll, commanding an extensive prospect through the trees, which are opened like a fan. Windsor Castle terminates this lovely view. Within the temple there is a long inscription from the Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5, sc. 5, beginning thus,

The grounds, laid out with so much fine taste, terminate in a lovely little dell, sheltered on every side. In the centre there is a circle bordered with box, and growing within it, a collection of all the known varieties of heath. The plants were then in full flower, and innumerable honey-bees were feeding and buzzing. To one who, in early life, had been accustomed to tread the heath-covered hills of Scotland, the unexpected sight of these blooming plants of the mountain was a treat; and the effect was heightened on seeing the bust of Scotia’s most admired bard, Thomson, adorning it. The inscription was from that sublime, almost divine hymn, with which the Seasons conclude, and eminently well applied to the heath, as some one or other of the varieties blossom nearly all the year through.

In that secluded dell I bade a sorrowful and unwilling adieu to the lady who had shown such extraordinary politeness. It may be worth the while to mention that she was soon after married, much against the wish of Mr. Penn, who had a great aversion to any changes in his establishment; for a kinder, a better, a more pious, or more accomplished gentleman than the late John Penn, of Stoke Park, England could not boast.

In consequence of the extraordinary prices lately paid for the autograph copies of Gray’s poems, more particularly that of the Elegy, it has been thought it would be acceptable to the readers of the Magazine to be presented with a fac simile. The following have therefore been traced, and engraved with great care and accuracy, from the first and last stanzas of the Elegy, and the signature from a letter. These will give an exact idea of the peculiarly neat and elegant handwriting of the Poet of Stoke.

FROM THE GERMAN OF KORNER.

———

BY WILLIAM C. BRYANT.

———

OR LOVE AND PRIDE.

———

BY ENNA DUVAL.

———

It was a warm, cloudy, sultry summer morning—scarcely a breath of air stirred the clematis and woodbine blossoms that peeped in and clustered around the breakfast-room window, greeting us with fresh fragrance; but on this morning no pleasant air breathed sighingly over them, and they looked drooping and faded. I was visiting my friend Effie Morris, who resided in a pleasant country village, some twenty or thirty miles from my city home. We were both young, and had been school-girl friends from early childhood. The preceding winter had been our closing session at school, and we were about entering our little world as women. Effie was an only daughter of a widowed mother. Possessing comfortable means, they lived most pleasantly in their quiet romantic little village. Effie had stayed with me during the winters of her school-days, while I had always returned the compliment by spending the summer months at her pleasant home. Her mother was lovely both in mind and disposition, and though she had suffered much from affliction, she still retained youthful and sympathizing feelings. Effie was gentle and beautiful, and the most innocent, unsophisticated little enthusiast that ever breathed. She had arrived at the age of seventeen, and to my certain knowledge had never felt the first heart-throb; never had been in love. In vain had we attended the dancing-school balls, and little parties. A host of boy-lovers surrounded the little set to which we belonged, and yet Effie remained entirely heart-whole. She never flirted, never sentimentalized with gentlemen, and she was called cold and matter-of-fact, by those who judged her alone by her manner; but one glance in her soft, dove-like eyes, it seems to me, should have set them a doubting. I have seen those expressive eyes well up with tears when together we would read some old story or poem—

or leaning from our bed-room window, at midnight, we would gaze on the silvery moon in the heavens, listening to the rippling notes of the water-spirits that to our fancy inhabited the sparkling stream that ran near the house. How beautifully would she improvise at times—for improvisations in truth were they, while she was quite unconscious of her gift. She never wrote a line of poetry, but when in such moods, every word she uttered was true, pure poetry. She had a most remarkable memory, and seemed never to forget a line she read. To me she would repeat page after page of our favorite authors, when we would be wandering through the woods, our arms entwined around each other.

Effie Morris was an enthusiastic dreamer, and entertained certain little romantic exaggerated opinions, out of which it was impossible to argue her—sometimes her actions ran contrary to these opinions, and we would fancy that surely now she would admit the fallacy of her arguments in favor of them; but when taxed with it, she would in the most earnest, sincere manner defend her original position, proving to us that no matter how her actions appeared to others, they were in her own mind entirely in keeping with these first expressed opinions, which to us seemed entirely at variance. But she was so gentle in argument, and proved so plainly that though her reasoning might be false, her thoughts were so beautiful and pure, as to make us feel perfectly willing to pardon her obstinacy.

On the morning I speak of, we lounged languidly over the breakfast-table, not caring to taste of the tempting crisp rolls, or drink of the fragrant Mocha juice, the delicious fumes of which rose up from the delicate China cups all unheeded by us. At first we talked listlessly of various things, wandering from subject to subject, and at last, to our surprise, we found ourselves engaged in a sprightly, animated argument; each forgetting the close atmosphere that seemed at first to weigh down all vivacity. The subject of this argument was the possibility of pride overcoming love in a woman’s heart. Mrs. Morris and I contended that love weakened or quite died out if the object proved unworthy or indifferent. Our romantic Effie of course took the opposite side. True love to her mind was unalterable. Falsehood, deceit, change—no matter what sorrow, she said, might afflict the pure loving heart—its love would still remain. “I cannot,” she exclaimed enthusiastically, “imagine for an instant that true, genuine love should—could have any affinity with pride. When I see a woman giving evidence of what is called high spirit in love matters, I straightway lose all sympathy for her heart-troubles. I say to myself—she has never truly loved.”

We argued, but in vain; at length her mother laughingly cried out—“Nonsense, Effie, no one would sooner resent neglect from a lover than yourself. True love, as you call it, would never make such a spiritless, meek creature out of the material of which you are composed.”

“Yes, in truth,” I added, as I saw our pretty enthusiast, half vexed, shake her head obstinately at her mother’s prophecy—“I can see those soft eyes of yours, Effie, darling, flash most eloquent fire, should your true love meet with unworthiness.”

During our conversation the clouds had broken, the wind changed, and a delicious breeze came sweeping in at the windows as if to cool our cheeks, flushed with the playful argument.

“Will you ride or walk this morning, girls?” asked Mrs. Morris, as we arose from the breakfast-table.

“Oh, let us take our books, guitar and work up the mill-stream to the old oak, dear mamma,” exclaimed Effie, “and spend an hour or two there.”

“But it will be mid-day when we return,” replied her mother.

“That’s true,” said Effie, laughing, “but Leven can drive up to the old broken bridge for us at mid-day.”

“To be sure he can,” said Mrs. Morris, and accordingly we sallied forth, laden with books and netting, while a servant trudged on ahead, with camp-stools and guitar. Nothing eventful occurred on that particular morning, and yet though years have passed since then, I never recall the undulating scenery of the narrow, dark, winding mill-stream of Stamford, but it presents itself to my mind’s eye as it looked on that morning. In my waking or sleeping dreams, I see the old oak at the morning hours, and whenever the happy moments I have spent at Effie Morris’ country home come to my memory, this morning is always the brightest, most vivid picture presented before me by my fancy. As Hans Christian Andersen says with such poetic eloquence in his Improvisatore—“It was one of those moments which occur but once in a person’s life, which, without signalizing itself by any great life-adventure, yet stamps itself in its whole coloring upon the Psyche wings.”

We walked slowly along the narrow bank—tall trees towered around us, whose waving branches, together with the floating clouds, were mirrored with exquisite distinctness on the bosom of the dark, deep, narrow stream—near at shore lay the dreaming, luxurious water-lilies, and a thousand beautiful blossoms bent over the bank, and kissed playfully the passing waters, or coquetted with the inconstant breeze. Our favorite resting-place was about a mile’s walk up the beautiful stream, and to reach it we had to cross to the opposite shore, over a rude, half-ruined bridge, which added to the picturesque beauty of the scenery. The oak was a century old tree, and stood upon rising ground a short distance from the shore. How calmly and happily passed that morning. Effie sang wild ballads for us, and her rich full notes were echoed from the distance by the spirit voices of the hills. We wove garlands of water-lilies and wild flowers, and when I said we were making Ophelias of ourselves, Effie, with shy earnestness most bewitching, unloosened her beautiful hair, twining the long locks, and banding her temples with the water-lily garlands and long grass—then wrapping an India muslin mantle around her shoulders, she gathered up the ends on her arms, filling them with sprigs of wild blossoms, and acted poor Ophelia’s mad scene most touchingly. Tears gathered in our eyes as she concluded the wild, wailing melody

There was a deep, touching pathos in her voice as she uttered the minor notes of this song, and her soft eyes beamed half vacantly, half reverently, as looking up to heaven she uttered in low breathing tones—

Then suddenly arousing herself, she looked toward us and murmured, as she turned away with a sad, tearful smile, “God be wi’ you.” The illusion was perfect, and we both sobbed outright.

Effie Morris was one of the few true geniuses I have known in my life time; and when I have said this to those who only met with her in society, they have laughed and wondered what genius there could be in my cold, quiet friend.

The following winter Effie entered society. Her mother had many gay and fashionable friends in the principal northern cities, and during the winter season her letters to me were dated at one time from Washington, then again from some other gay city; and in this free from care pleasant manner did her days pass. Household duties kept me, though a young girl, close at home. Possibly if Effie had been thrown into the active domestic sphere which was my mission, her history might have been different. She certainly would have been less of a dreamer. Exquisite waking dreams, woven of the shining fairy threads of fancy, meet with but poor encouragement in every-day life, and take flight sometimes never to return, when one is rudely awakened from them in order to attend to “the baked and the broiled.” I remember, when a girl, feeling at times a little restive under the duties unavoidably imposed upon me, and often would indulge in a morbid sentimental humor, dreaming over some “rare old poet” or blessed romance, to the exceeding great detriment of my household affairs, making my poor father sigh over a tough, badly cooked stake, and cheerless, dusty house; but these moods, to my credit be it told, were of rare occurrence; and I say now the best school for a dreaming, enthusiastic girl, who sighs for the realization of her fancy visions, is to place her in charge of some active duty—to make her feel it is exacted from her—that she must see it performed. I mean not that a delicate intellectual spirit should be borne to the earth disheartened with care and hard labor—but a share of domestic cares, domestic duties, is both wholesome and necessary for a woman. Cultivate if possible in a girl a taste for reading and study first, then she will soon find time for intellectual pursuits, which, from being in a measure denied to her, will become dearer. In her attempts to secure moments for the indulgence of her mental desires she will unconsciously learn order, management and economy of time and labor, thus will her mind be strengthened. But I am digressing, dear reader. I am sadly talkative on this subject, and sometimes fancy I could educate a girl most famously; and when “thinking aloud” of the perfect woman my theory would certainly complete, I am often pitched rudely from my self-satisfied position, by some married friend saying, in a half vexed, impatient tone—“Ah, yes, this is all very fine in theory—no doubt you would be successful—we all know the homely adage—‘old bachelors’ wives and old maids’ children,’ &c.”

Effie was not what is called a belle in society. She was too cold and spiritual. Her beauty was too delicate to make an impression in the gay ball-room; and she cared little for what both men and women in the world pine after—popularity. She danced and talked only with those who pleased her, and sometimes not at all if it did not suit her fancy. There was a great contrast between her mother and herself. Mrs. Morris, though “forty rising,” was still a fine-looking, distingué woman; and on her re-entrance into society with her daughter, she produced a greater impression than did Effie. She had a merry, joyous disposition, and without possessing half the mental superiority her daughter was gifted with, she had a light, easy conversational ability, playful repartee, an elegant style and manner, and a sufficient knowledge of accomplishments to produce an effect in the gay world, and make her the centre of attraction of every circle she entered; and the world wondered so brilliant a mother should have so indifferent a daughter. She doted on Effie; and, I am sure, loved her all the more for her calm, quiet way. She often said to me, “Effie is very superior to the women one meets with—she has a pure, elevated spirit. So delicate a nature as hers is not properly appreciated in this world.”

One summer there came a wooing of Effie a most excellent gentleman. He had met with her the preceding winter in some gay circle, and had discernment enough to discover the merits of our jewel. How anxiously Mrs. Morris and I watched the wooing—for we were both anxious for Mr. Grayson’s success. He was in every way worthy of her—high-minded, honorable, and well to do in the world—some years her senior, but handsome and elegant in appearance. He must have had doubts of his success, for he let the live-long summer pass ere he ventured on his love speech. We were a pleasant party—Mrs. Morris, Effie, myself, Mr. Grayson, and Lucien Decker, a cousin of Mrs. Morris—a college youth, who only recently had become one of the family. Lucien Decker’s family lived in a distant state, and only until he came to a northern college to finish his studies had he known his pleasant relatives. He was a bright, interesting, graceful youth, and wondrous clever, we thought. We would spend morning after morning wandering up the mill-stream, resting under the old oak, where Mr. Grayson would discourse most pleasantly, or read aloud to us; and sometimes, after Effie and I had chanted simple melodies, we would prevail on Lucien to recite some of his own poetry, at which he was, indeed, most clever—he recited well, and wrote very delicately and beautifully. At last Mr. Grayson ventured on a proposal; but, to our sorrow, he met with a calm, gentle refusal; and to relieve his disappointment, he sailed in the fall for Europe.

Not long after his departure, to our surprise, Effie and Lucien announced themselves as lovers. No objection, surely, could be made; but such a thing had never entered our minds. Though of the same age with Effie and myself, he had always seemed as a boy in comparison to us, and I had always treated him with the playful familiarity of a youth. He was more intelligent and interesting than young men of his age generally are; indeed he gave promise of talent—and he was likewise good-looking; but, in truth, when we compared him with the elegant and finished Mr. Grayson, we felt a wee bit out of patience; and if we did not give utterance aloud to our thoughts, I shrewdly suspect if those thoughts had formed themselves into words, those words would have sounded very much like, “Nonsensical sentimentality!” “strange infatuation!” but nothing could be said with propriety, and the engagement was fully entered into. Some time had necessarily to elapse before its fulfillment, however, for the lover was but twenty; but it was well understood, that when he had finished his studies, and was settled in his profession, he was to wed our darling Effie. After the acceptance of his suit, Lucien seemed perfectly happy, and, I must confess, made himself particularly interesting. He walked and read with us, and wrote such beautiful poetry in honor of Effie’s charms, that we were at last quite propitiated. He was, indeed, an ardent lover; and his enthusiastic, earnest wooing, was very different from Mr. Grayson’s calm, dignified manner. He caused our quiet Effie a deal of entertainment, however; for when he was an acknowledged lover, like all such ardent dispositions, he showed himself to be an exacting one. Her calm, cold manner would set him frantic at times; and he would vow she could not love him; but these lovers’ quarrels instead of wearying Effie, seemed to produce a contrary effect.

They had been engaged a year or so, when one summer a belle of the first water made her appearance in the village-circle of Stamford. Kate Barclay was her name. She was a Southerner, and a reputed heiress. She had come rusticating, she said; and shrugging her pretty shoulders, she would declare in a bewitching, languid tone, “truly a face and figure needed rest after a brillant winter campaign.” Old Mrs. Barclay, a dear, nice old lady in the village, was her aunt; and as we were the only young ladies of a companionable age, Kate was, of course, a great deal with us. She was, indeed, a delicious looking creature. She had large, melting dark eyes, and rich curling masses of hair, that fell in clusters over her neck and shoulders, giving her a most romantic appearance. She understood fully all the little arts and wiles of a belle; and she succeeded in securing admiration. Superficial she was, but showy; and could put on at will all moods, from the proud and dignified, to the bewitching and childlike. We had no gentlemen visiters with us when she first came, not even Lucien; for some engagement had taken him from Effie for a week or two, and our pretty southern damsel almost expired with ennui. When we first met with her, she talked so beautifully of the delights of a quiet country life, seemed so enchanted with every thing and every body, and so eloquent in praise of rambles in the forest, sunsets, moonlights, rushing streamlets, &c., &c., that we decided she was an angel forthwith. But one or two ramblings quite finished her—for she complained terribly of dust, sun, and fatigue; moreover, we quite neglected to notice or admire her picturesque rambling dress, which inadvertency provoked her into telling us that the gentlemen at Ballston, or some other fashionable watering-place, had declared she looked in it quite like Robin Hood’s maid Marian. The gorgeous summer sunsets and clear moonlight nights, soon wearied her—for we were too much occupied with the beauties of nature to notice her fine attitudes, or beautiful eyes cast up imploringly to heaven, while she recited, in a half theatrical manner, passages of poetry descriptive of her imaginary feelings. I suspected she was meditating a flitting, when one day Lucien, and two of his student friends, made their appearance amongst us. How quickly her mood changed; the listless, yawning, dissatisfied manner disappeared, and we heard her the first night of their arrival delighting them, as she had us, with her fascinating ecstasies over rural enjoyments. She sentimentalized, flirted, romped, laughed, dressed in a picturesque manner, and “was every thing by turns, but nothing long,” evidently bent upon bringing to her feet the three gentlemen. Lucien’s friends soon struck their flags, and were her humble cavaliers—but a right tyrannical mistress she proved to them, making them scowl, and say sharp things to each other in a most ferocious manner, very amusing to us; but Lucien was impregnable. She played off all her arts in vain, he seemed unconscious, and devoted himself entirely to Effie. At first she was so occupied with securing the two other prizes she overlooked his delinquency, but when certain of them, she was piqued into accomplishing a conquest of him likewise. I did not think she would be successful, and amused myself by quietly watching her manœuvres.

One bright moonlight evening the gentlemen rowed us up the mill-stream, and as we returned we landed at our favorite oak. The waters, swelled by recent rains, came dashing and tumbling along in mimic billows; the moon beamed down a heavenly radiance, and as the little wavelets broke against the shore, they glittered like molten silver, covering the wild blossoms with dazzling fairy gems. Kate’s two lovers were talking and walking with Mrs. Morris and Effie along the shore. Lucien, Kate, and I, remained on a little bank that rose abruptly from the water. She did, indeed, look most bewitchingly beautiful; her soft, white dress, bound at the waist by a flowing ribbon, floated in graceful folds around her; her lovely neck, shoulders and arms, were quite uncovered, and her rich, dark hair fell in loose, long curls, making picturesque shadows in the moonlight. She could act the inspired enthusiast to perfection; and what our Effie really was, she could affect most admirably. She seemed unconscious of our presence; indeed, I do not think she thought I was near her, and, as if involuntarily, she burst out into one of her affected rhapsodies, her eyes beamed brightly, and she expressed her feelings most rapturously, concluding with repeating, in low, earnest, half trembling tones, some lines of Lucien’s she had taken from my Scrap Book, descriptive of the very scene before her, written the preceding summer for Effie, after a moonlight ramble together. The poetry was quite impassioned; and I heard Kate murmur with a sigh, as she turned away after concluding her quotation, as if sick at heart, “Ah! I would give years of brilliant success for one hour of devotion from such a lover.”

No one heard her but Lucien and myself—and I was one listener more than she would have desired; for Lucien’s ear alone was the ejaculation intended, the good for nothing little flirt. It produced the intended effect, for I saw Lucien watching her with admiring interest. She noted the impression, and cunningly kept it up. There was such a contrast between Effie and Kate, rather to Effie’s disadvantage, I had to confess, and Kate’s affected expressions of intense feeling, rather served to heighten Effie’s natural coldness of manner. Why waste words—the conclusion is already divined. The coquette succeeded—and ere a week had passed Lucien was her infatuated, devoted admirer; Effie was quite forgotten. Lucien’s two friends, wretched, and completely maddened by the cool, contemptuous rejections they received from Kate, left Stamford, vowing eternal hatred for womankind, and uttering deep, dire denunciations against all coquettes, leaving the field open to Lucien, who seemed to have perfectly lost all sense of propriety in his infatuation. Effie looked on as calmly and quietly as though she were not particularly interested. I fancied, for the credit of romance and sentiment, that her cheek was paler; and I thought I could detect at times a trembling of her delicate lips—but she said not a word. Mrs. Morris and I displayed much more feeling; but what could we do—and half amused, half vexed, we watched the conduct of the naughty little flirt. Suddenly Kate received a summons home—and right glad I was to hear of it. She announced it to us one evening, saying she expected her father the next day. The following afternoon she came over to our cottage, accompanied with two middle-aged gentlemen. The elder of the two was Mr. Barclay, her father, who had known Mrs. Morris in early life; the other she introduced as Col. Paulding, a friend. Col. Paulding’s manner struck us with surprise. He called her “Kate;” and though dignified, was affectionate. She seemed painfully embarrassed, and anxious to terminate the visit. She answered our questions hurriedly, and appeared ill at ease. Lucien was not present, fortunately for her; and I fancied she watched the door, as if anxiously fearing his entrance; certain it was she started nervously at every distant sound.

“Will you revisit Stamford next summer, Miss Barclay?” I asked.

Kate replied that she was uncertain at present.

“I suppose Kate has not told you,” said her father, laughingly, “that long before another summer she will cease to be mistress of her own movements. She expects to be in Germany next summer, I believe, with her husband,” and he looked significantly at Col. Paulding, who was standing out on the lawn with Mrs. Morris, admiring the beautiful view, quite out of hearing distance. Effie was just stepping from the French window of the drawing-room into the conservatory to gather some of her pretty flowers for her visiters, as she heard Mr. Barclay say this. She turned with a stern, cold look, and regarded Kate Barclay quietly. Kate colored crimson, then grew deadly white, and trembled from head to foot; but her father did not notice it, as he had followed Col. Paulding and Mrs. Morris out on the lawn. There we three stood, Effie, cold and pale as a statue, and Kate looking quite like a criminal. She looked up, attempting to make some laughing remark, but the words died in her throat as she met Effie’s stern, cold glance; she gasped, trembled, then rallied, and at last, with a proud look of defiance, she swept out on the lawn, and taking Col. Paulding’s arm, proposed departure. She bade us good-bye most gracefully; but I saw that she avoided offering her hand to Effie. As the gate closed, she looked over her shoulder indifferently, and said, in a saucy, laughing tone,

“Oh, pray make my adieux to Mr. Decker. I regret that I shall not see him to bid him good-bye. I depend upon the charity of you ladies to keep me fresh in his remembrance;” and, as far as we could see her down the road, we heard her forced laugh and unnaturally loud voice.

Lucien came in a few minutes after they left, and Mrs. Morris delivered Kate’s message. He looked agitated, and after swallowing his cup of tea hastily and quietly, he took up his hat and went out. He went to see Kate, but she, anticipating his visit, had retired with a violent headache immediately after her walk; but Lucien staid long enough to discover, as we had, Col. Paulding’s relation to the fascinating coquette. This we learned long afterward. The next day Lucien left Stamford without saying more than cold words of good-bye. He did not go with Kate’s party, we felt certain; and many weeks passed without hearing from him. Effie never made a remark; and our days passed quietly as they had before the appearance of Kate Barclay in our quiet little village. It was not long, however, before we saw in the newspapers, and read without comment, the marriage of Kate Barclay with Col. Paulding.

“See this,” said Mrs. Morris to me one morning as I entered the drawing-room, and she handed me a letter. We were alone, Effie was attending to her plants in the conservatory. I took the letter and read it. It was a wild, impassioned one from Lucien. Two months had elapsed since his silent departure, and this first letter was written to Mrs. Morris. It was filled with self-reproaches, and earnest entreaties for her intercession and mine with Effie. He cursed his infatuation, and the cause of it, and closed with the declaration that he would be reckless of life if Effie remained unforgiving. As I finished reading the letter I heard Effie’s voice warbling in wild and plaintive notes in the conservatory,

And the scene at the opening of this story rose before my remembrance—the playful argument—the declaration made by her that true, pure love could not have any affinity with pride—and I was lost in reverie.

“What would you do, Enna?” inquired Mrs. Morris.

“Give the letter to Effie without remark,” I replied. “We cannot intercede for him—he does not deserve to be forgiven.”

The letter was given to Effie, who read it quietly; and if she evinced emotion, it was not before us. She said she was sorry for Lucien, for she had discovered a change in her own feelings. She did not love him as she fancied she had, and she could not in justice to herself fulfill their engagement—it was impossible. She wrote this to him, and all his wild letters were laid calmly and quietly aside. Can this be pride? I said to myself. But she seemed as though she suspected my thoughts, for the night before I returned to my city home, as we were leaning against the window-frame of our bed-room, listening the last time for that season to the tumbling, dashing water-music, she said,

“Enna, dear, it was not spirit and pride that made me act so unkindly to Lucien—indeed, it was not. But I mistook my feelings for him from the first. I fancied I loved him dearly, when I only loved him as a sister. Believe me, if that love had existed once for him, his foolish infatuation for Kate Barclay would not have been regarded by me one moment.”

Two or three years passed, and Effie still remained unwedded, when, to our delight, Mr. Grayson, who had returned from Europe, again addressed her. She accepted him; and I was, indeed, happy when I officiated as bridesmaid for her. One year after that joyous wedding we stood over her bier, weeping bitter, bitter tears. We laid her in the grave—and the heart-broken mother soon rested beside her. Among her papers was a letter directed to me; it was written in expectation of death, although we did not any of us anticipate such a calamity.

“I am not long for this world, dear Enna,” she wrote, “I feel I am dying daily; and yet, young as I am, it grieves me not, except when I think of the sorrow my death will occasion to others. When you read this I shall be enveloped in the heavy grave-clothes; but then I shall be at rest. Oh! how my aching, weary spirit pines for rest. Do not fancy that sorrow or disappointment has brought me to this. I fancied I loved Lucien Decker fondly, devotedly; and how happy was I when under the influence of that fancy. That fatal summer, at the time of his infatuation for that heartless girl, insensibly a chilling hardness crept over my feelings. I struggled against my awakening; and if Lucien had displayed any emotion before his departure, I might still have kept up the happy delusion. But in vain, it disappeared, and with it all the beauty of life, which increased in weariness from that moment. I sought for some object of interest—I married; but, though my husband has been devoted and kind, I weary of existence. Life has no interest for me. I hail the approach of death. Farewell.”

I read these sad lines with eyes blinded with tears; and I could not help thinking how Effie had deceived herself; unconsciously she had become a victim of the very pride she had condemned.

———

BY ELIZABETH J. EAMES.

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[WITH AN ENGRAVING.]

———

BY ROBT. T. CONRAD.

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A. B. Ross

A PORTRAITE.

Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine

OR, ROSE BUDD.

———

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PILOT,” “RED ROVER,” “TWO ADMIRALS,” “WING-AND-WING,” “MILES WALLINGFORD,” ETC.

———

(Continued from page 48.)

PART XV.

It has now become necessary to advance the time three entire days, and to change the scene to Key West. As this latter place may not be known to the world at large, it may be well to explain that it is a small seaport, situate on one of the largest of the many low islands that dot the Florida Reef, that has risen into notice, or indeed into existence as a town, since the acquisition of the Floridas by the American Republic. For many years it was the resort of few besides wreckers, and those who live by the business dependent on the rescuing and repairing of stranded vessels, not forgetting the salvages. When it is remembered that the greater portion of the vessels that enter the Gulf of Mexico stand close along this reef, before the trades, for a distance varying from one to two hundred miles, and that nearly every thing which quits it, is obliged to beat down its rocky coast in the Gulf Stream for the same distance, one is not to be surprised that the wrecks, which so constantly occur, can supply the wants of a considerable population. To live at Key West is the next thing to being at sea. The place has sea air, no other water than such as is preserved in cisterns, and no soil, or so little as to render even a head of lettuce a rarity. Turtle is abundant, and the business of “turtling” forms an occupation additional to that of wrecking. As might be expected in such circumstances, a potato is a far more precious thing than a turtle’s egg, and a sack of the tubers would probably be deemed a sufficient remuneration for enough of the materials of callipash and callipee to feed all the aldermen extant.

Of late years, the government of the United States has turned its attention to the capabilities of the Florida Reef, as an advanced naval station; a sort of Downs, or St. Helen’s Roads, for the West Indian seas. As yet little has been done beyond making the preliminary surveys, but the day is not probably very distant when fleets will lie at anchor among the islets described in our earlier chapters, or garnish the fine waters of Key West. For a long time it was thought that even frigates would have a difficulty in entering and quitting the port of the latter, but it is said that recent explorations have discovered channels capable of admitting any thing that floats. Still Key West is a town yet in its chrysalis state, possessing the promise rather than the fruition of the prosperous days which are in reserve. It may be well to add, that it lies a very little north of the 24th degree of latitude, and in a longitude quite five degrees west from Washington. Until the recent conquests in Mexico it was the most southern possession of the American government, on the eastern side of the continent; Cape St. Lucas, at the extremity of Lower California, however, being two degrees farther south.

It will give the foreign reader a more accurate notion of the character of Key West, if we mention a fact of quite recent occurrence. A very few weeks after the closing scenes of this tale, the town in question was, in a great measure, washed away! A hurricane brought in the sea upon all these islands and reefs, water running in swift currents over places that within the memory of man were never before submerged. The lower part of Key West was converted into a raging sea, and every thing in that quarter of the place disappeared. The foundation being of rock, however, when the ocean retired the island came into view again, and industry and enterprise set to work to repair the injuries.

The government has established a small hospital for seamen at Key West. Into one of the rooms of the building thus appropriated our narrative must now conduct the reader. It contained but a single patient, and that was Spike. He was on his narrow bed, which was to be but the precursor of a still narrower tenement, the grave. In the room with the dying man were two females, in one of whom our readers will at once recognize the person of Rose Budd, dressed in deep mourning for her aunt. At first sight, it is probable that a casual spectator would mistake the second female for one of the ordinary nurses of the place. Her attire was well enough, though worn awkwardly, and as if its owner were not exactly at ease in it. She had the air of one in her best attire, who was unaccustomed to be dressed above the most common mode. What added to the singularity of her appearance, was the fact, that while she wore no cap, her hair had been cut into short, gray bristles, instead of being long, and turned up, as is usual with females. To give a sort of climax to this uncouth appearance, this strange-looking creature chewed tobacco.

The woman in question, equivocal as might be her exterior, was employed in one of the commonest avocations of her sex—that of sewing. She held in her hand a coarse garment, one of Spike’s, in fact, which she seemed to be intently busy in mending; although the work was of a quality that invited the use of the palm and sail-needle, rather than that of the thimble and the smaller implement known to seamstresses, the woman appeared awkward in her business, as if her coarse-looking and dark hands refused to lend themselves to an occupation so feminine. Nevertheless, there were touches of a purely womanly character about this extraordinary person, and touches that particularly attracted the attention, and awakened the sympathy of the gentle Rose, her companion. Tears occasionally struggled out from beneath her eyelids, crossed her dark, sun-burnt cheek, and fell on the coarse canvas garment that lay in her lap. It was after one of these sudden and strong exhibitions of feeling that Rose approached her, laid her own little, fair hand, in a friendly way, though unheeded, on the other’s shoulder, and spoke to her in her kindest and softest tones.

“I do really think he is reviving, Jack,” said Rose, “and that you may yet hope to have an intelligent conversation with him.”

“They all agree he must die,” answered Jack Tier—for it was he, appearing in the garb of his proper sex, after a disguise that had now lasted fully twenty years—“and he will never know who I am, and that I forgive him. He must think of me in another world, though he isn’t able to do it in this; but it would be a great relief to his soul to know that I forgive him.”

“To be sure, a man must like to take a kind leave of his own wife before he closes his eyes forever; and I dare say it would be a great relief to you to tell him that you have forgotten his desertion of you, and all the hardships it has brought upon you in searching for him, and in earning your own livelihood as a common sailor.”

“I shall not tell him I’ve forgotten it, Miss Rose; that would be untrue—and there shall be no more deception between us; but I shall tell him that I forgive him, as I hope God will one day forgive me all my sins.”

“It is, certainly, not a light offence to desert a wife in a foreign land, and then to seek to deceive another woman,” quietly observed Rose.

“He’s a willian!” muttered the wife—“but—but—”

“You forgive him, Jack—yes, I’m sure you do. You are too good a Christian to refuse to forgive him.”

“I’m a woman a’ter all, Miss Rose; and that, I believe, is the truth of it. I suppose I ought to do as you say, for the reason you mention; but I’m his wife—and once he loved me, though that has long been over. When I first knew Stephen, I’d the sort of feelin’s you speak of, and was a very different creatur’ from what you see me to-day. Change comes over us all with years and sufferin’.”

Rose did not answer, but she stood looking intently at the speaker more than a minute. Change had, indeed, come over her, if she had ever possessed the power to please the fancy of any living man. Her features had always seemed diminitive and mean for her assumed sex, as her voice was small and cracked; but, making every allowance for the probabilities, Rose found it difficult to imagine that Jack Tier had ever possessed, even under the high advantages of youth and innocence, the attractions so common to her sex. Her skin had acquired the tanning of the sea; the expression of her face had become hard and worldly; and her habits contributed to render those natural consequences of exposure and toil even more than usually marked and decided. By saying “habits,” however, we do not mean that Jack had ever drank to excess, as happens with so many seamen, for this would have been doing her injustice, but she smoked and chewed—practices that intoxicate in another form, and lead nearly as many to the grave as excess in drinking. Thus all the accessories about this singular being, partook of the character of her recent life and duties. Her walk was between a waddle and a seaman’s roll; her hands were discolored with tar, and had got to be full of knuckles, and even her feet had degenerated into that flat, broad-toed form that, perhaps, sooner distinguishes caste, in connection with outward appearances, than any one other physical peculiarity. Yet this being had once been young—had once been even fair; and had once possessed that feminine air and lightness of form, that as often belongs to the youthful American of her sex, perhaps, as to the girl of any other nation on earth. Rose continued to gaze at her companion for some time, when she walked musingly to a window that looked out upon the port.

“I am not certain whether it would do him good or not to see this sight,” she said, addressing the wife kindly, doubtful of the effect of her words even on the latter. “But here are the sloop-of-war, and several other vessels.”

“Ay, she is there; but never will his foot be put on board the Swash ag’in. When he bought that brig I was still young, and agreeable to him; and he gave her my maiden name, which was Mary, or Molly Swash. But that is all changed; I wonder he did not change the name with his change of feelin’s.”

“Then you did really sail in the brig in former times, and knew the seaman whose name you assumed?”

“Many years. Tier, with whose name I made free, on account of his size, and some resemblance to me in form, died under my care; and his protection fell into my hands, which first put the notion into my head of hailing as his representative. Yes, I knew Tier in the brig, and we were left ashore at the same time—I, intentionally, I make no question; he, because Stephen Spike was in a hurry, and did not choose to wait for a man. The poor fellow caught the yellow fever the very next day, and did not live eight-and-forty hours. So the world goes; them that wish to live, die; and them that wants to die, live!”

“You have had a hard time for one of your sex, poor Jack—quite twenty years a sailor, did you not tell me?”

“Every day of it, Miss Rose—and bitter years have they been; for the whole of that time have I been in chase of my husband, keeping my own secret, and slaving like a horse for a livelihood.”

“You could not have been old when he left—that is—when you parted.”

“Call it by its true name, and say at once, when he desarted me. I was under thirty by two or three years, and was still like my own sex to look at. All that is changed since; but I was comely then.”

“Why did Capt. Spike abandon you, Jack; you have never told me that.”

“Because he fancied another. And ever since that time he has been fancying others, instead of remembering me. Had he got you, Miss Rose, I think he would have been content for the rest of his days.”

“Be certain, Jack, I should never have consented to marry Capt. Spike.”

“You’re well out of his hands,” answered Jack, sighing heavily, which was much the most feminine thing she had done during the whole conversation, “well out of his hands—and God be praised it is so. He should have died, before I would let him carry you off the island—husband or no husband.”

“It might have exceeded your power to prevent it under other circumstances, Jack.”

Rose now continued looking out of the window in silence. Her thoughts reverted to her aunt and Biddy, and tears rolled down her cheeks as she remembered the love of one, and the fidelity of the other. Their horrible fate had given her a shock that, at first, menaced her with a severe fit of illness; but her strong, good sense, and excellent constitution, both sustained by her piety and Harry’s manly tenderness, had brought her through the danger, and left her, as the reader now sees her, struggling with her own griefs, in order to be of use to the still more unhappy woman who had so singularly become her friend and companion.

The reader will readily have anticipated that Jack Tier had early made the females on board the Swash her confidents. Rose had known the outlines of her history from the first few days they were at sea together, which is the explanation of the visible intimacy that had caused Mulford so much surprise. Jack’s motive in making his revelations might possibly have been tinctured with jealousy, but a desire to save one as young and innocent as Rose was at its bottom. Few persons but a wife would have supposed our heroine could have been in any danger from a lover like Spike; but Jack saw him with the eyes of her own youth, and of past recollections, rather than with those of truth. A movement of the wounded man first drew Rose from the window. Drying her eyes hastily, she turned toward him, fancying that she might prove the better nurse of the two, notwithstanding Jack’s greater interest in the patient.

“What place is this—and why am I here?” demanded Spike, with more strength of voice than could have been expected, after all that had passed. “This is not a cabin—not the Swash—it looks like a hospital.”

“It is a hospital, Capt. Spike,” said Rose, gently drawing near the bed; “you have been hurt, and have been brought to Key West, and placed in the hospital. I hope you feel better, and that you suffer no pain.”

“My head isn’t right—I don’t know—every thing seems turned round with me—perhaps it will all come out as it should. I begin to remember—where is my brig?”

“She is lost on the rocks. The seas have broken her into fragments.”

“That’s melancholy news, at any rate. Ah! Miss Rose! God bless you—I’ve had terrible dreams. Well, it’s pleasant to be among friends—what creature is that—where does she come from?”

“That is Jack Tier,” answered Rose, steadily. “She turns out to be a woman, and has put on her proper dress, in order to attend on you during your illness. Jack has never left your bedside since we have been here.”

A long silence succeeded this revelation. Jack’s eyes twinkled, and she hitched her body half aside, as if to conceal her features, where emotions that were unusual were at work with the muscles. Rose thought it might be well to leave the man and wife alone—and she managed to get out of the room unobserved.

Spike continued to gaze at the strange-looking female, who was now his sole companion. Gradually his recollection returned, and with it the full consciousness of his situation. He might not have been fully aware of the absolute certainty of his approaching death, but he must have known that his wound was of a very grave character, and that the result might early prove fatal. Still that strange and unknown figure haunted him; a figure that was so different from any he had ever seen before, and which, in spite of its present dress, seemed to belong quite as much to one sex as to the other. As for Jack—we call Molly, or Mary Swash by her masculine appellation, not only because it is more familiar, but because the other name seems really out of place, as applied to such a person—as for Jack, then, she sat with her face half averted, thumbing the canvas, and endeavoring to ply the needle, but perfectly mute. She was conscious that Spike’s eyes were on her; and a lingering feeling of her sex told her how much time, exposure, and circumstances, had changed her person—and she would gladly have hidden the defects in her appearance.

Mary Swash was the daughter as well as the wife of a ship-master. In her youth, as has been said before, she had even been pretty, and down to the day when her husband deserted her, she would have been thought a female of a comely appearance rather than the reverse. Her hair in particular, though slightly coarse, perhaps, had been rich and abundant; and the change from the long, dark, shining, flowing locks which she still possessed in her thirtieth year, to the short, gray bristles that now stood exposed without a cap, or covering of any sort, was one very likely to destroy all identity of appearance. Then Jack had passed from what might be called youth to the verge of old age, in the interval that she had been separated from her husband. Her shape had changed entirely; her complexion was utterly gone; and her features, always unmeaning, though feminine, and suitable to her sex, had become hard and slightly coarse. Still there was something of her former self about Jack that bewildered Spike; and his eyes continued fastened on her for quite a quarter of an hour in profound silence.

“Give me some water,” said the wounded man, “I wish some water to drink.”

Jack arose, filled a tumbler and brought it to the side of the bed. Spike took the glass and drank, but the whole time his eyes were riveted on his strange nurse. When his thirst was appeased, he asked—

“Who are you? How came you here?”

“I am your nurse. It is common to place nurses at the bedsides of the sick.”

“Are you man or woman?”

“That is a question I hardly know how to answer. Sometimes I think myself each; sometimes neither.”

“Did I ever see you before?”

“Often, and quite lately. I sailed with you in your last voyage.”

“You! That cannot be. If so, what is your name?”

“Jack Tier.”

A long pause succeeded this announcement, which induced Spike to muse as intently as his condition would allow, though the truth did not yet flash on his understanding. At length the bewildered man again spoke.

“Are you Jack Tier?” he said slowly, like one who doubted. “Yes—I now see the resemblance, and it was that which puzzled me. Are they so rigid in this hospital that you have been obliged to put on woman’s clothes in order to lend me a helping hand?”

“I am dressed as you see, and for good reasons.”

“But Jack Tier run, like that rascal Mulford—ay, I remember now; you were in the boat when I over-hauled you all on the reef.”

“Very true; I was in the boat. But I never run, Stephen Spike. It was you who abandoned me, on the islet in the gulf, and that makes the second time in your life that you have left me ashore, when it was your duty to carry me to sea.”

“The first time I was in a hurry, and could not wait for you; this last time you took sides with the women. But for your interference, I should have got Rose, and married her, and all would now have been well with me.”

This was an awkward announcement for a man to make to his legal wife. But after all Jack had endured, and all Jack had seen during the late voyage, she was not to be overcome by this avowal. Her self-command extended so far as to prevent any open manifestation of emotion, however much her feelings were excited.

“I took sides with the women, because I am a woman myself,” she answered, speaking at length with decision, as if determined to bring matters to a head at once. “It is natural for us all to take sides with our kind.”

“You a woman, Jack! That is very remarkable. Since when have you hailed for a woman? You have shipped with me twice, and each time as a man—though I’ve never thought you able to do seaman’s duty.”

“Nevertheless, I am what you see; a woman born and edicated; one that never had on man’s dress until I knew you. You supposed me to be a man, when I came off to you in the skiff to the eastward of Riker’s Island, but I was then what you now see.”

“I begin to understand matters,” rejoined the invalid, musingly. “Ay, ay, it opens on me; and I now see how it was you made such fair weather with Madam Budd and pretty, pretty Rose. Rose is pretty, Jack; you must admit that, though you be a woman.”

“Rose is pretty—I do admit it; and what is better, Rose is good.” It required a heavy draft on Jack’s justice and magnanimity, however, to make this concession.

“And you told Rose and Madam Budd about your sex; and that was the reason they took to you so on the v’y’ge?”

“I told them who I was, and why I went abroad as a man. They know my whole story.”

“Did Rose approve of your sailing under false colors, Jack?”

“You must ask that of Rose herself. My story made her my friend; but she never said any thing for or against my disguise.”

“It was no great disguise a’ter all, Jack. Now you’re fitted out in your own clothes, you’ve a sort of half-rigged look; one would be as likely to set you down for a man under jury-canvas, as for a woman.”

Jack made no answer to this, but she sighed very heavily. As for Spike himself, he was silent for some little time, not only from exhaustion, but because he suffered pain from his wound. The needle was diligently but awkwardly plied in this pause.

Spike’s ideas were still a little confused; but a silence and rest of a quarter of an hour cleared them materially. At the end of that time he again asked for water. When he had drank, and Jack was once more seated, with his side-face toward him, at work with the needle, the captain gazed long and intently at this strange woman. It happened that the profile of Jack preserved more of the resemblance to her former self, than the full face; and it was this resemblance that now attracted Spike’s attention, though not the smallest suspicion of the truth yet gleamed upon him. He saw something that was familiar, though he could not even tell what that something was, much less to what or whom it bore any resemblance. At length he spoke.

“I was told that Jack Tier was dead,” he said; “that he took the fever, and was in his grave within eight-and-forty hours after we sailed. That was what they told me of him.”

“And what did they tell you of your own wife, Stephen Spike. She that you left ashore at the time Jack was left?”

“They said she did not die for three years later. I heard of her death at New Orleens, three years later.”

“And how could you leave her ashore—she, your true and lawful wife?”

“It was a bad thing,” answered Spike, who, like all other mortals, regarded his own past career, now that he stood on the edge of the grave, very differently from what he had regarded it in the hour of his health and strength. “Yes, it was a very bad thing; and I wish it was ondone. But it is too late now. She died of the fever, too—that’s some comfort; had she died of a broken-heart, I could not have forgiven myself. Molly was not without her faults—great faults, I considered them; but, on the whole, Molly was a good creatur’.”

“You liked her, then, Stephen Spike?”

“I can truly say that when I married Molly, and old Capt. Swash put his da’ghter’s hand into mine, that the woman wasn’t living who was better in my judgment, or handsomer in my eyes.”

“Ay, ay—when you married her; but how was it a’terwards. When you was tired of her, and saw another that was fairer in your eyes?”

“I desarted her; and God has punished me for the sin! Do you know, Jack, that luck has never been with me since that day. Often and often have I bethought me of it; and sartain as you sit there, no great luck has ever been with me, or my craft, since I went off, leaving my wife ashore. What was made in one v’y’ge, was lost in the next. Up and down, up and down the whole time, for so many, many long years, that gray hairs set in, and old age was beginning to get close aboard—and I as poor as ever. It has been rub and go with me ever since; and I have had as much as I could do to keep the brig in motion, as the only means that was left to make the two ends meet.”

“And did not all this make you think of your poor wife—she whom you had so wronged?”

“I thought of little else, until I heard of her death at New Orleens—and then I gave it up as useless. Could I have fallen in with Molly at any time a’ter the first six months of my desartion, she and I would have come together again, and every thing would have been forgotten. I knowed her very nature, which was all forgiveness to me at the bottom, though seemingly so spiteful and hard.”

“Yet you wanted to have this Rose Budd, who is only too young, and handsome, and good for you.”

“I was tired of being a widower, Jack; and Rose is wonderful pretty. She has money, too, and might make the evening of my days comfortable. The brig was old, as you must know, and has long been off of all the Insurance Offices’ books; and she couldn’t hold together much longer. But for this sloop-of-war, I should have put her off on the Mexicans; and they would have lost her to our people in a month.”

“And was it an honest thing to sell an old and worn-out craft to any one, Stephen Spike?”

Spike had a conscience that had become hard as iron by means of trade. He who traffics much, most especially if his dealings be on so small a scale as to render constant investigations of the minor qualities of things necessary, must be a very fortunate man, if he preserve his conscience in any better condition. When Jack made this allusion, therefore, the dying man—for death was much nearer to Spike than even he supposed, though he no longer hoped for his own recovery—when Jack made this allusion, then, the dying man was a good deal at a loss to comprehend it. He saw no particular harm in making the best bargain he could; nor was it easy for him to understand why he might not dispose of any thing he possessed for the highest price that was to be had. Still he answered in an apologetic sort of way.

“The brig was old, I acknowledge,” he said, “but she was strong, and might have run a long time. I only spoke of her capture as a thing likely to take place soon, if the Mexicans got her; so that her qualities were of no great account, unless it might be her speed—and that you know was excellent, Jack.”

“And you regret that brig, Stephen Spike, lying as you do on your death-bed, more than any thing else.”

“Not as much as I do pretty Rose Budd, Jack; Rosy is so delightful to look at!”

The muscles of Jack’s face twitched a little, and she looked deeply mortified; for, to own the truth, she hoped that the conversation had so far turned her delinquent husband’s thoughts to the past, as to have revived in him some of his former interest in herself. It is true, he still believed her dead; but this was a circumstance Jack overlooked—so hard is it to hear the praises of a rival, and be just. She felt the necessity of being more explicit, and determined at once to come to the point.

“Stephen Spike,” she said, steadily, drawing near to the bed-side, “you should be told the truth, when you are heard thus extolling the good looks of Rose Budd, with less than eight-and-forty hours of life remaining. Mary Swash did not die, as you have supposed, three years a’ter you desarted her, but is living at this moment. Had you read the letter I gave you in the boat, just before you made me jump into the sea, that would have told you where she is to be found.”

Spike stared at the speaker intently; and when her cracked voice ceased, his look was that of a man who was terrified as well as bewildered. This did not arise still from any gleamings of the real state of the case, but from the soreness with which his conscience pricked him, when he heard that his much-wronged wife was alive. He fancied, with a vivid and rapid glance at the probabilities, all that a woman abandoned would be likely to endure in the course of so many long and suffering years.

“Are you sure of what you say, Jack? You wouldn’t take advantage of my situation to tell me an untruth?”

“As certain of it as of my own existence. I have seen her quite lately—talked with her of you—in short, she is now at Key West, knows your state, and has a wife’s feelin’s to come to your bed-side.”

Notwithstanding all this, and the many gleamings he had had of the facts during their late intercourse on board the brig, Spike did not guess at the truth. He appeared astounded, and his terror seemed to increase.

“I have another thing to tell you,” continued Jack, pausing but a moment to collect her own thoughts. “Jack Tier—the real Jack Tier—he who sailed with you of old, and whom you left ashore at the same time you desarted your wife, did die of the fever, as you was told, in eight-and-forty hours a’ter the brig went to sea.”

“Then who, in the name of Heaven, are you? How came you to hail by another’s name as well as by another sex?”

“What could a woman do, whose husband had desarted her in a strange land?”

“That is remarkable! So you’ve been married? I should not have thought that possible; and your husband desarted you, too. Well, such things do happen.” Jack now felt a severe pang. She could not but see that her ungainly—we had almost said her unearthly appearance—prevented the captain from even yet suspecting the truth; and the meaning of his language was not easily to be mistaken. That any one should have married her, seemed to her husband as improbable as it was probable he would run away from her as soon as it was in his power after the ceremony.

“Stephen Spike,” resumed Jack, solemnly, “I am Mary Swash—I am your wife!”

Spike started in his bed; then he buried his face in the coverlet—and he actually groaned. In bitterness of spirit the woman turned away and wept. Her feelings had been blunted by misfortune and the collisions of a selfish world; but enough of former self remained to make this the hardest of all the blows she had ever received. Her husband, dying as he was, as he must and did know himself to be, shrunk from one of her appearance, unsexed as she had become by habits, and changed by years and suffering.

[To be continued.

———

BY J. BAYARD TAYLOR.

———

AND A PLAIN MAN’S LOVE.

———

BY N. P. WILLIS.

———

That the truths arrived at by the unaccredited short road of “magnetism” had better be stripped of their technical phraseology, and set down as the gradual discoveries of science and experience, is a policy upon which acts many a sagacious believer in “clairvoyance.” Doubtless, too, there is, here and there, a wise man, who is glad enough to pierce, with the eyes of an incredible agent, the secrets about him, and let the world give him credit, by whatever name they please, for the superior knowledge of which he silently takes advantage. I should be behind the time, if I had not sounded to the utmost of my ability and opportunity the depth of this new medium. I have tried it on grave things and trifles. If the unveiling which I am about to record were of more use to myself than to others, perhaps I should adopt the policy of which I have just spoken, and give the result, simply as my own shrewd lesson learned in reading the female heart. But the truths I unfold will instruct the few who need and can appreciate them, while the whole subject is not of general importance enough to bring down cavilers upon the credibility of their source. I thus get rid of a very detestable though sometimes necessary evil, (“qui nescit dissimulare nescit vivere,” says the Latin sage,) that of shining by any light that is not absolutely my own.

I am a very plain man in my personal appearance—so plain that a common observer, if informed that there was a woman who had a fancy for my peculiar type, would wonder that I was not thankfully put to rest for life as a seeker after love—a second miracle of the kind being a very slender probability. It is not in beauty that the taste for beauty alone resides, however. In early youth my soul, like the mirror of Cydippe, retained, with enamored fidelity, the image of female loveliness copied in the clear truth of its appreciation, and the passion for it had become, insensibly, the thirst of my life, before I thought of it as more than an intoxicating study. To be loved—myself beloved—by a creature made in one of the diviner moulds of woman, was, however, a dream that shaped itself into waking distinctness at last, and from that hour I took up the clogging weight of personal disadvantages, to which I had hitherto unconsciously been chained, and bore it heavily in the race which the well-favored ran as eagerly as I.

I am not to recount, here, the varied experiences of my search, the world over, after beauty and its smile. It is a search on which all travelers are more than half bent, let them name as they please their professed errand in far countries. The coldest scholar in art will better remember a living face of a new cast of expression, met in the gallery of Florence, than the best work of Michael Angelo, whose genius he has crossed an ocean to study; and a fair shoulder crowded against the musical pilgrim, in the Capella Sistiera, will be taken surer into his soul’s inner memory than the best outdoing of “the sky-lark taken up into heaven,” by the ravishing reach of the Miserere. Is it not true?

There can hardly be now, I think, a style of female beauty of which I have not appreciated the meaning and comparative enchantment, nor a degree of that sometimes more effective thing than beauty itself—its expression breathing through features otherwise unlovely—that I have not approached near enough to weigh and store truthfully in remembrance. The taste forever refines in the study of woman. We return to what, with immature eye, we at first rejected; we intensify, immeasurably, our worship of the few who wear on their foreheads the star of supreme loveliness, confessed pure and perfect by all beholders alike; we detect it under surfaces which become transparent only with tenderness or enthusiasm; we separate the work of Nature’s material chisel from the resistless and warm expansion of the soul swelling its proportions to fill out the shape it is to tenant hereafter. Led by the purest study of true beauty, the eager mind passes on from the shrine where it lingered to the next of whose greater brightness it becomes aware; and this is the secret of one kind of “inconstancy in love,” which should be named apart from the variableness of those seekers of novelty, who, from unconscious self-contempt, value nothing they have had the power to win.

An unsuspected student of beauty, I passed years of loiterings in the living galleries of Europe and Asia, and, like self-punishing misers in all kinds of amassings, stored up boundlessly more than, with the best trained senses, I could have found the life to enjoy. Of course I had a first advantage, of dangerous facility, in my unhappy plainness of person—the alarm-guard that surrounds every beautiful woman in every country of the world—letting sleep at my approach the cautionary reserve which presents bayonet so promptly to the good-looking. Even with my worship avowed, and the manifestation of grateful regard which a woman of fine quality always returns for elevated and unexacting admiration I was still left with such privilege of access as is granted to the family-gossip, or to an innocuous uncle, and it is of such a passion, rashly nurtured under this protection of an improbability, that I propose to tell the inner story.

PART II.

I was at the Baths of Lucca during a season made gay by the presence of a large proportion of the agreeable and accessible court of Tuscany. The material for my untiring study was in abundance, yet it was all of the worldly character which the attractions of the place would naturally draw together, and my homage had but a choice between differences of display, in the one pursuit of admiration. In my walks through the romantic mountain-paths of the neighborhood, and along the banks of the deep-down river that threads the ravine above the village, I had often met, meantime, a lady accompanied by a well-bred and scholar-like looking man; and though she invariably dropped her veil at my approach, her admirable movement, as she walked, or stooped to pick a flower, betrayed that conscious possession of beauty and habitual confidence in her own grace and elegance, which assured me of attractions worth taking trouble to know. By one of those “unavoidable accidents” which any respectable guardian angel will contrive, to oblige one, I was a visiter to the gentleman and lady—father and daughter—soon after my curiosity had framed the desire; and in her I found a marvel of beauty, from which I looked in vain for my usual escape—that of placing the ladder of my heart against a loftier and fairer.

Mr. Wangrave was one of those English gentlemen who would not exchange the name of an ancient and immemorially wealthy family for any title that their country could give them, and he used this shield of modest honor simply to protect himself in the enjoyment of habits, freed, as far as refinement and culture could do it, from the burthens and intrusions of life above and below him. He was ceaselessly educating himself—like a man whose whole life was only too brief an apprenticeship to a higher existence—and, with an invalid but intellectual and lovely wife, and a daughter who seemed unconscious that she could love, and who kept gay pace with her youthful-hearted father in his lighter branches of knowledge, his family sufficed to itself, and had determined so to continue while abroad. The society of no Continental watering-place has a very good name, and they were there for climate and seclusion. With two ladies, who seemed to occupy the places and estimation of friends, (but who were probably the paid nurse and companion to the invalid,) and a kind-hearted old secretary to Mr. Wangrave, whose duties consisted in being as happy as he could possibly be, their circle was large enough, and it contained elements enough—except only, perhaps, the réveille that was wanting for the apparently slumbering heart of Stephania.

A month after my first call upon the Wangraves, I joined them on their journey to Vallambrosa, where they proposed to take refuge from the sultry coming of the Italian autumn. My happiness would not have been arranged after the manner of this world’s happiness, if I had been the only addition to their party up the mountain. They had received with open arms, a few days before leaving Lucca, a young man from the neighborhood of their own home, and who, I saw with half a glance, was the very Eidolon and type of what Mr. Wangrave would desire as a fitting match for his daughter. From the allusions to him that had preceded his coming, I had learned that he was the heir to a brilliant fortune, and was coming to his old friends to be congratulated on his appointment to a captaincy in the Queen’s Guards—as pretty a case of an “irresistible” as could well have been compounded for expectation. And when he came—the absolute model of a youth of noble beauty—all frankness, good manners, joyousness, and confidence, I summoned courage to look alternately at Stephania and him, and the hope, the daring hope that I had never yet named to myself, but which was already master of my heart, and its every pulse and capability, dropped prostrate and lifeless in my bosom. If he did but offer her the life-minute of love, of which I would give her, it seemed to me, for the same price, an eternity of countless existences—if he should but give her a careless word, where I could wring a passionate utterance out of the aching blood of my very heart—she must needs be his. She would be a star else that would resign an orbit in the fair sky, to illumine a dim cave; a flower that would rather bloom on a bleak moor, than in the garden of a king—for, with such crushing comparisons, did I irresistibly see myself as I remembered my own shape and features, and my far humbler fortunes than his, standing in her presence beside him.

Oh! how every thing contributed to enhance the beauty of that young man. How the mellow and harmonizing tenderness of the light of the Italian sky gave sentiment to his oval cheek, depth to his gray-blue eye, meaning to their overfolding and thick-fringed lashes. Whatever he said with his finely-cut lips, was looked into twenty times its meaning by the beauty of their motion in that languid atmosphere—an atmosphere that seemed only breathed for his embellishment and Stephania’s. Every posture he took seemed a happy and rare accident, which a painter should have been there to see. The sunsets, the moonlight, the chance back-ground and fore-ground, of vines and rocks—every thing seemed in conspiracy to heighten his effect, and make of him a faultless picture of a lover.

“Every thing,” did I say? Yes, even myself—for my uncomely face and form were such a foil to his beauty as a skillful artist would have introduced to heighten it when all other art was exhausted, and every one saw it except Stephania; and little they knew how, with perceptions far quicker than theirs, I felt their recognition of this, in the degree of softer kindness in which they unconsciously spoke to me. They pitied me, and without recognizing their own thought—for it was a striking instance of the difference in the gifts of nature—one man looking scarce possible to love, and beside him, another, of the same age, to whose mere first-seen beauty, without a word from his lips, any heart would seem unnatural not to leap in passionate surrender.

We were the best of sudden friends, Palgray and I. He, like the rest, walked only the outer vestibule of the sympathies, viewlessly deepening and extending, hour by hour, in that frank and joyous circle. The interlinkings of soul, which need no language, and which go on, whether we will or no, while we talk with friends, are so strangely unthought of by the careless and happy. He saw in me no counter-worker to his influence. I was to him but a well-bred and extremely plain man, who tranquilly submitted to forego all the first prizes of life, content if I could contribute to society in its unexcited voids, and receive in return only the freedom of its outer intercourse, and its friendly esteem. But, oh! it was not in the same world that he and I knew Stephania. He approached her from the world in whose most valued excellences, beauty and wealth, he was pre-eminently gifted—I, from the viewless world, in which I had at least more skill and knowledge. In the month that I had known her before he came, I had sedulously addressed myself to a character within her, of which Palgray had not even a conjecture; and there was but one danger of his encroachment on the ground I had gained—her imagination might supply in him the nobler temple of soul-worship, which was still unbuilt, and which would never be builded except by pangs such as he was little likely to feel in the undeepening channel of happiness. He did not notice that I never spoke to her in the same key of voice to which the conversation of others was attuned. He saw not that, while she turned to him with a smile as a preparation to listen, she heard my voice as if her attention had been arrested by distant music—with no change in her features except a look more earnest. She would have called him to look with her at a glowing sunset, or to point out a new comer in the road from the village; but if the moon had gone suddenly into a cloud and saddened the face of the landscape, or if the wind had sounded mournfully through the trees, as she looked out upon the night, she would have spoken of that first to me.

PART III.

I am flying over the track, of what was to me a torrent—outlining its course by alighting upon, here and there, a point where it turned or lingered.

The reader has been to Vallambrosa—if not once as a pilgrim, at least often with writers of travels in Italy. The usages of the convent are familiar to all memories—their lodging of the gentlemen of a party in cells of their own monastic privilege, and giving to the ladies less sacred hospitalities, in a secular building of meaner and unconsecrated architecture. (So, oh, mortifying brotherhood, you shut off your only chance of entertaining angels unaware!)

Not permitted to eat with the ladies while on the holy mountain, Mr. Wangrave and his secretary, and Palgray and I, fed at the table with the aristocratic monks—(for they are the aristocrats of European holiness, these monks of Vallambrosa.) It was somewhat a relief to me, to be separated with my rival from the party in the feminine refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and when we sat down at the long and bare table, with the thoughtful and ashen-cowled company, sad as I was, it was an opiate sadness—a suspension from self-mastery, under torture which others took to be pleasure.

The temperature of the mountain-air was just such as to invite us to never enter doors except to eat and sleep; and breakfasting at convent-hours, we passed the long day in rambling up the ravines and through the sombre forests, drawing, botanizing, and conversing in group around some spot of exquisite natural beauty; and all of the party, myself excepted, supposing it to be the un-dissenting, common desire to contrive opportunity for the love-making of Palgray and Stephania. And, bitter though it was, in each particular instance, to accept a hint from one and another, and stroll off, leaving the confessed lovers alone by some musical water-fall, or in the secluded and twilight dimness of some curve in an overhanging ravine—places where only to breathe is to love—I still felt an instinctive prompting to rather anticipate than wait for these reminders, she alone knowing what it cost me to be without her in that delicious wilderness; and Palgray, as well as I could judge, having a mind out of harmony with both the wilderness and her.

He loved her—loved her as well as most women need to be, or know that they can be loved. But he was too happy, too prosperous, too universally beloved, to love well. He was a man, with all his beauty, more likely to be fascinating to his own sex than to hers, for the women who love best, do not love in the character they live in; and his out-of-doors heart, whose joyfulness was so contagious, and whose bold impulses were so manly and open, contented itself with gay homage, and left unplummeted the sweetest as well as deepest wells of the thoughtful tenderness of woman.

To most observers, Stephania Wangrave would have seemed only born to be gay—the mere habit of being happy having made its life-long imprint upon her expression of countenance, and all of her nature, that would be legible to a superficial reader, being brought out by the warm translucence of her smiles. But while I had seen this, in the first hour of my study of her, I was too advanced in my knowledge (of such works of nature as encroach on the models of Heaven) not to know this to be a light veil over a picture of melancholy meaning. Sadness was the tone of her mind’s inner coloring. Tears were the subterranean river upon which her soul’s bark floated with the most loved freight of her thought’s accumulation—the sunny waters of joy, where alone she was thought to voyage, being the tide on which her heart embarked no venture, and which seemed to her triflingly garish and even profaning to the hallowed delicacy of the inner nature.

It was so strange to me that Palgray did not see this through every lineament of her marvelous beauty. There was a glow under her skin, but no color—an effect of paleness—fair as the lotus-leaf, but warmer and brighter, and which came through the alabaster fineness of the grain, like something the eye cannot define, but which we know by some spirit-perception to be the effluence of purer existence, the breathing through, as it were, of the luminous tenanting of an angel. To this glowing paleness, with golden hair, I never had seen united any but a disposition of predominant melancholy; and it seemed to me dull indeed otherwise to read it. But there were other betrayals of the same inner nature of Stephania. Her lips, cut with the fine tracery of the penciling upon a tulip-cup, were of a slender and delicate fullness, expressive of a mind which took—(of the senses)—only so much life as would hold down the spirit during its probation; and when this spiritual mouth was at rest, no painter has ever drawn lips on which lay more of the unutterable pensiveness of beauty which we dream to have been Mary’s, in the childhood of Jesus. A tear in the heart was the instinctive answer to Stephania’s every look when she did not smile; and her large, soft, slowly-lifting eyes, were to any elevated perception, it seemed to me, most eloquent of tenderness as tearful as it was unfathomable and angelic.

I shall have failed, however, in portraying truly the being of whom I am thus privileged to hold the likeness in my memory, if the reader fancies her to have nurtured her pensive disposition at the expense of a just value for real life, or a full development of womanly feelings. It was a peculiarity of her beauty, to my eye, that, with all her earnest leaning toward a thoughtful existence, there did not seem to be one vein beneath her pearly skin, not one wavy line in her faultless person, that did not lend its proportionate consciousness to her breathing sense of life. Her bust was of the slightest fullness which the sculptor would choose for the embodying of his ideal of the best blending of modesty with complete beauty; and her throat and arms—oh, with what an inexpressible pathos of loveliness, so to speak, was moulded, under an infantine dewiness of surface, their delicate undulations. No one could be in her presence without acknowledging the perfection of her form as a woman, and rendering the passionate yet subdued homage which the purest beauty fulfills its human errand by inspiring; but, while Palgray made the halo which surrounded her outward beauty the whole orbit of his appreciation, and made of it, too, the measure of the circle of topics he chose to talk upon, there was still another and far wider ring of light about her, which he lived in too dazzling a gayety of his own to see—a halo of a mind more beautiful than the body which shut it in; and in this intellectual orbit of guidance to interchange of mind, with manifold deeper and higher reach than Palgray’s, upon whatever topic chanced to occur, revolved I, around her who was the loveliest and most gifted of all the human beings I had been privileged to meet.

PART IV.

The month was expiring at Vallambrosa, but I had not mingled, for that length of time, with a fraternity of thoughtful men, without recognition of some of that working of spontaneous and elective magnetism to which I have alluded in a previous part of this story. Opposite me, at the table of the convent refectory, had sat a taciturn monk, whose influence I felt from the first day—a stronger consciousness of his presence, that is to say, than of any one of the other monks—though he did not seem particularly to observe me, and till recently had scarce spoken to me at all. He was a man of perhaps fifty years of age, with the countenance of one who had suffered and gained a victory of contemplation—a look as if no suffering could be new to him, and before whom no riddle of human vicissitudes could stay unread; but over all this penetration and sagacity was diffused a cast of genial philanthropy and good-fellowship which told of his forgiveness of the world for what he had suffered in it. With a curiosity more at leisure, I should have sought him out, and joined him in his walks to know more of him; but spiritually acquainted though I felt we had become, I was far too busy with head and heart for any intercourse, except it had a bearing on the struggle for love that I was, to all appearance, so hopelessly making.

Preparations were beginning for departure, and with the morrow, or the day after, I was to take my way to Venice—my friends bound to Switzerland and England, and propriety not permitting me to seek another move in their company. The evening on which this was made clear to me, was one of those continuations of day into night made by the brightness of a full Italian moon; and Palgray, whose face, troubled, for the first time, betrayed to me that he was at a crisis of his fate with Stephania, evidently looked forward to this glowing night as the favorable atmosphere in which he might urge his suit, with nature pleading in his behalf. The reluctance and evident irresolution of his daughter puzzled Mr. Wangrave—for he had no doubt that she loved Palgray, and his education of her head and heart gave him no clue to any principle of coquettishness, or willingness to give pain, for the pleasure of an exercise of power. Her mother, and all the members of the party, were aware of the mystery that hung over the suit of the young guardsman, but they were all alike discreet, while distressed, and confined their interference to the removal of obstacles in the way of the lovers being together, and the avoidance of any topics gay enough to change the key of her spirits from the natural softness of the evening.

Vespers were over, and the sad-colored figures of the monks were gliding indolently here and there, and Stephania, with Palgray beside her, stood a little apart from the group at the door of the secular refectory, looking off at the fading purple of the sunset. I could not join her without crossing rudely the obvious wishes of every person present; yet for the last two days, I had scarce found the opportunity to exchange a word with her, and my emotion now was scarce controllable. The happier lover beside her, with his features heightened in expression (as I thought they never could be) by his embarrassment in wooing, was evidently and irresistibly the object of her momentary admiration. He offered her his arm, and made a movement toward the path off into the forest. There was an imploring deference infinitely becoming in his manner, and see it she must, with pride and pleasure. She hesitated—gave a look to where I stood, which explained to me better than a world of language, that she had wished at least to speak to me on this last evening—and, before the dimness over my eyes had passed away, they were gone. Oh! pitying Heaven! give me never again, while wrapt in mortal weakness, so harsh a pang to suffer.

PART V.

The convent-bell struck midnight, and there was a foot-fall in the cloister. I was startled by it out of an entire forgetfulness of all around me, for I was lying on my bed in the monastery cell, with my hands clasped over my eyes, as I had thrown myself down on coming in; and, with a strange contrariety, my mind, broken rudely from its hope, had flown to my far away home, oblivious of the benumbed links that lay between. A knock at my door completed the return to my despair, for with a look at the walls of my little chamber, in the bright beam of moonlight that streamed in at the narrow window, I was, by recognition, again at Vallambrosa, and Stephania, with an accepted lover’s voice in her ear, was again near me, her moistened eyes steeped with Palgray’s in the same beam of the all-visiting and unbetraying moon.

Father Ludovic entered. The gentle tone of his benedicite, told me that he had come on an errand of sympathy. There was little need of preliminary between two who read the inner countenance as habitually as did both of us; and as briefly as the knowledge and present feeling of each could be re-expressed in words, we confirmed the spirit-mingling that had brought him there, and were presently as one. He had read truly the drama of love, enacting in the party of visiters to his convent, but his judgment of the possible termination of it was different from mine.

Palgray’s dormitory was at the extremity of the cloister, and we presently heard him pass.

“She is alone, now,” said Father Ludovic, “I will send you to her.”

My mind had strained to Stephania’s presence with the first footsteps that told me of their separation; and it needed but a wave of his hand to unlink the spirit-wings from my weary frame. I was present with her.

I struggled for a moment, but in vain, to see her face. Its expression was as visible as my hand in the sun, but no feature. The mind I had read was close to me, in a presence of consciousness; and, in points, here and there, brighter, bolder, and further-reaching than I had altogether believed. She was unutterably pure—a spirit without a spot—and I remained near her with a feeling as if my forehead were pressed down to the palms of my hands, in homage mixed with sorrow, for I should have more recognized this in my waking study of her nature.

A moment more—a trembling effort, as if to read what were written to record my companionship for eternity—and a vague image of myself came out in shadow—clearer now, and still clearer, enlarging to the fullness of her mind. She thought wholly and only of that image I then saw, yet with a faint coloring playing to and from it, as influences came in from the outer world. Her eyes were turned in upon it in lost contemplation. But suddenly a new thought broke upon me. I saw my image, but it was not I, as I looked to myself. The type of my countenance was there; but, oh, transformed to an ideal, such as I now, for the first time, saw possible—ennobled in every defective line—purified of its taint from worldliness—inspired with high aspirations—cleared of what it had become cankered with, in its transmission through countless generations since first sent into the world, and restored to a likeness of the angel of whose illuminated lineaments it was first a copy. So thought Stephania of me. Thus did she believe I truly was. Oh! blessed, and yet humiliating, trust of woman! Oh! comparison of true and ideal, at which spirits must look out of heaven, and of which they must long, with aching pity, to make us thus rebukingly aware!

I felt myself withdrawing from Stephania’s presence. There were tears between us, which I could not see. I strove to remain, but a stronger power than my will was at work within me. I felt my heart swell with a gasp, as if death were bearing out of it the principle of life; and my head dropped on the pillow of my bed.

“Good night, my son,” said the low voice of Father Ludovic, “I have willed that you should remember what you have seen. Be worthy of her love, for there are few like her.”

He closed the door, and as the glide of his sandals died away in the echoing cloisters, I leaned forth to spread my expanding heart in the upward and boundless light of the moon—for I seemed to wish never again to lose in the wasteful forgetfulness of sleep, the consciousness that I was loved by Stephania.

I was journeying the next day, alone, toward Venice. I had left written adieux for the party at Vallambrosa, pleading to my friends an unwillingness to bear the pain of a formal separation. Betwixt midnight and morning, however, I had written a parting letter for Stephania, which I had committed to the kind envoying of Father Ludovic, and thus it ran:—

———

BY THOMAS BUCHANAN READ.

———

AN ENGLISH TRAGEDY OF REAL LIFE.

———

BY HENRY WILLIAM HERBERT, AUTHOR OF “THE ROMAN TRAITOR,” “MARMADUKE WYVIL,” ETC.

———

(Concluded from page 22.)

PART II.

A lovely summer’s evening in the year 168-, was drawing toward its close, when many a gay and brilliant cavalcade of both sexes, many of the huge gilded coaches of that day, and many a train of liveried attendants, winding through the green lane, as they arrived, some in this direction from Eton, some in that, across Datchet-mead, from Windsor, and its royal castle, came thronging toward Ditton-in-the-Dale.

Lights were beginning to twinkle, as the shadows fell thick among the arcades of the trim gardens, and the wilder forest-walks which extended their circuitous course for many a mile along the stately hall of the Fitz-Henries; loud bursts of festive or of martial music came pealing down the wind, mixed with the hum of a gay and happy concourse, causing the nightingales to hold their peace, not in despair of rivaling the melody, but that the mirth jarred unpleasantly on the souls of the melancholy birds.

The gates of Ditton-in-the-Dale were flung wide open, for it was gala night, and never had the old hall put on a gayer or more sumptuous show than it had donned that evening.

From far and near the gentry and the nobles of Buckingham and Berkshire had gathered to the birthday ball—for such was the occasion of the festive meeting.

Yes! it was Blanche Fitz-Henry’s birth-day; and on this gay and glad anniversary was the fair heiress of that noble house to be introduced to the great world as the future owner of those beautiful demesnes.

From the roof to the foundation the old manor-house—it was a stately red brick mansion of the latter period of Elizabethan architecture, with mullioned windows, and stacks of curiously wreathed chimneys—was one blaze of light; and as group after group of gay and high-born riders came caracoling up to the hospitable porch, and coach after coach, with its running footmen, or mounted outriders lumbered slowly in their train, the saloons and corridors began to fill up rapidly, with a joyous and splendid company.

The entrance-hall, a vast square apartment, wainscoted with old English oak, brighter and richer in its dark hues than mahogany, received the entering guests; and what with the profusion of wax-lights, pendant in gorgeous chandeliers from the carved roof, or fixed in silver sconces to the walls, the gay festoons of green wreaths and fresh summer flowers, mixed quaintly with old armor, blazoned shields, and rustling banners, some of which had waved over the thirsty plains of Syria, and been fanned by the shouts of triumph that pealed so high at Cressy and Poitiers, it presented a not unapt picture of that midway period—that halting-place, as it were, between the old world and the new—when chivalry and feudalism had ceased already to exist among the nations, but before the rudeness of reform had banished the last remnants of courtesy, and the reverence for all things that were high and noble—for all things that were fair and graceful—for all things, in one word, except the golden calf, the mob-worshiped mammon.

Within this stately hall was drawn up in glittering array, the splendid band of the Life Guards, for royalty himself was present, and all the officers of that superb regiment, quartered at Windsor, had followed in his train; and as an ordinary courtesy to their well-proved and loyal host, the services of those chosen musicians had been tendered and accepted.

Through many a dazzling corridor, glittering with lights, and redolent of choicest perfumes, through many a fair saloon the guests were marshaled to the great drawing-room, where, beneath a canopy of state, the ill-advised and imbecile monarch, soon to be deserted by the very princes and princesses who now clustered round his throne, sat, with his host and his lovely daughters at his right hand, accepting the homage of the fickle crowd, who were within a little year to bow obsequiously to the cold-blooded Hollander.

That was a day of singular, and what would now be termed hideous costumes—a day of hair-powder and patches, of hoops and trains, of stiff brocades and tight-laced stomachers, and high-heeled shoes among the ladies—of flowing periwigs, and coats with huge cuffs and no collars, and voluminous skirts, of diamond-hilted rapiers, and diamond buckles, ruffles of Valenciennes and Mecklin lace, among the ruder sex. And though the individual might be metamorphosed strangely from the fair form which nature gave him, it cannot be denied that the concourse of highly-bred and graceful persons, when viewed as a whole, was infinitely more picturesque, infinitely more like what the fancy paints a meeting of the great and noble, than any assemblage now-a-days, however courtly or refined, in which the stiff dress coats and white neckcloths of the men are not to be redeemed by the Parisian finery—how much more natural, let critics tell, than the hoop and train—of the fair portion of the company.

The rich materials, the gay colors, the glittering jewelry, and waving plumes, all contributed their part to the splendor of the show; and in those days a gentleman possessed at least this advantage, lost to him in these practical utilitarian times, that he could not by any possibility be mistaken for his own valet de chambre—a misfortune which has befallen many a one, the most aristocratic not excepted, of modern nobility.

A truly graceful person will be graceful, and look well in every garb, however strange or outré; and there is, moreover, undoubtedly something, apart from any paltry love of finery, or mere vanity of person, which elevates the thoughts, and stamps a statelier demeanor on the man who is clad highly for some high occasion. The custom, too, of wearing arms, peculiar to the gentleman of that day, had its effect, and that not a slight one, as well on the character as on the bearing of the individual so distinguished.

As for the ladies, loveliness will still be loveliness, disguise it as you may; and if the beauties of King James’s court lost much by the travesty of their natural ringlets, they gained, perhaps, yet more from the increased lustre of their complexions and brilliancy of their eyes.

So that it is far from being the case, as is commonly supposed, that it was owing to fashion alone, and the influence of all powerful custom, that the costume of that day was not tolerated only, but admired by its wearers.

At this time, however, the use of hair-powder, though general, was by no means universal; and many beauties, who fancied that it did not suit their complexions, dispensed with it altogether, or wore it in some modified shape, and tinged with some coloring matter, which assimilated it more closely to the natural tints of the hair.

At all events, it must have been a dull eye, and a cold heart, that could have looked undelighted on the assemblage that night gathered in the ball-room of Ditton-in-the-Dale.

But now the reception was finished; the royal party moved into the ball-room, from which they shortly afterward retired, leaving the company at liberty from the restraint which their presence had imposed upon them. The concourse broke up into little groups; the stately minuet was performed, and livelier dances followed it; and gentlemen sighed tender sighs, and looked unutterable things; and ladies listened to soft nonsense, and smiled gentle approbation; and melting glances were exchanged, and warm hands were pressed warmly; and fans were flirted angrily, and flippant jokes were interchanged—for human nature, whether in the seventeeth or the nineteenth century, whether arrayed in brocade, or simply dressed in broadcloth, is human nature still; and, perhaps, not one feeling, or one passion, that actuated man’s or woman’s heart five hundred years ago, but dwells within it now, and shall dwell unchanged forever.

It needs not to say that, on such an occasion, in their own father’s mansion, and at the celebration of one sister’s birth-day, Blanche and Agnes, had their attractions been much smaller, their pretensions much more lowly than they really were, would have received boundless attention. But being as they were infinitely the finest girls in the room, and being, moreover, new debutantes on the stage of fashion, there was no limit to the admiration, to the furor which they excited among the wits and lady-killers of the day.

Many an antiquated Miss, proud of past conquests, and unable yet to believe that her career of triumph was, indeed, ended, would turn up an envious nose, and utter a sharp sneer at the forwardness and hoyden mirth of that pert Mistress Agnes, or at the coldness and inanimate smile of the fair heiress; but the sneer, even were it the sneer of a duke’s or a minister’s daughter, fell harmless, or yet worse, drew forth a prompt defence of the unjustly assailed beauty.

No greater proof could be adduced, indeed, of the amazing success of the sister beauties, than the unanimous decision of every lady in the room numbering less than forty years, that they were by no means uncommon; were pretty country hoppets, who, as soon as the novelty of their first appearance should have worn out, would cease to be admired, and sink back into their proper sphere of insignificance.

So thought not the gentle cavaliers; and there were many present there, well qualified to judge of ladies’ minds as of ladies’ persons; and not a few were heard to swear aloud, that the Fitz-Henries were as far above the rest of their sex in wit, and graceful accomplishment, as in beauty of form and face, and elegance of motion.

See! they are dancing now some gay, newly invented, Spanish dance, each whirling through the voluptuous mazes of the courtly measure with her own characteristic air and manner, each evidently pleased with her partner, each evidently charming him in turn; and the two together enchaining all eyes, and interesting all spectators, so that a gentle hum of approbation is heard running through the crowd, as they pause, blushing and panting from the exertion and excitement of the dance.

“Fore Gad! she is exquisite, George! I have seen nothing like her in my time,” lisped a superb coxcomb, attired in a splendid civilian’s suit of Pompadour and silver, to a young cornet of the Life Guard who stood beside him.

“Which she, my lord?” inquired the standard-bearer, in reply. “Methinks they both deserve your encomiums; but I would fain know which of the two your lordship means, for fame speaks you a dangerous rival against whom to enter the lists.”

“What, George!” cried the other, gayly, “are you about to have a throw for the heiress? Pshaw! it wont do, man—never think of it! Why, though you are an earl’s second son, and date your creation from the days of Hump-backed Dickon, old Allan would vote you a novus homo, as we used to say at Christ Church. Pshaw! George, go hang yourself! No one has a chance of winning that fair loveliness, much less of wearing her, unless he can quarter Sir Japhet’s bearings on his coat armorial.”

“It is the heiress, then, my lord,” answered George Delawarr, merrily. “I thought as much from the first. Well, I’ll relieve your lordship, as you have relieved me, from all fear of rivalry. I am devoted to the dark beauty. Egad! there’s life, there’s fire for you! Why, I should have thought the flash of that eye-glance would have reduced Jack Greville to cinders in a moment, yet there he stands, as calm and impassive a puppy as ever dangled a plumed hat, or played with a sword-knot. Your fair beauty’s cold, my lord. Give me that Italian complexion, and that coal-black hair! Gad zooks! I honor the girl’s spirit for not disguising it with starch and pomatum. There’s more passion in her little finger, than in the whole soul of the other.”

“You’re out there, George Delawarr,” returned the peer. “Trust me, it is not always the quickest flame that burns the strongest; nor the liveliest girl that feels the most deeply. There’s an old saying, and a true one, that still water aye runs deep. And, trust me, if I know any thing of the dear, delicious, devilish sex, as methinks I am not altogether a novice at the trade, if ever Blanche Fitz-Henry love at all, she will love with her whole soul and heart and spirit. That gay, laughing brunette will love you with her tongue, her eyes, her head, and perhaps her fancy—the other, if, as I say, she ever love at all, will love with her whole being.”

“The broad acres! my lord! all the broad acres!” replied the cornet, laughing more merrily than before. “Fore Gad! I think it the very thing for you. For the first Lord St. George was, I believe, in the ark with Noah, so that you will pass current with the first gentleman of England. I prithee, my lord, push your suit, and help me on a little with my dark Dulcinea.”

“Faith! George, I’ve no objection; and see, this dance is over. Let us go up and ask their fair hands. You’ll have no trouble in ousting that shallow-pated puppy Jack, and I think I can put the pass on Mr. privy-counsellor there, although he is simpering so prettily. But, hold a moment, have you been duly and in form presented to your black-eyed beauty?”

“Upon my soul! I hope so, my lord. It were very wrong else; for I have danced with her three times to-night already.”

“The devil! Well, come along, quick. I see that they are going to announce supper, so soon as this next dance shall be ended; and if we can engage them now, we shall have their fair company for an hour at least.”

“I am with you, my lord!”

And away they sauntered through the crowd, and ere long were coupled for a little space each to the lady of his choice.

The dance was soon over, and then, as Lord St. George had surmised, supper was announced, and the cavaliers led their ladies to the sumptuous board, and there attended them with all that courtly and respectful service, which, like many another good thing, has passed away and been forgotten with the diamond-hilted sword, and the full bottomed periwig.

George Delawarr was full as ever of gay quips and merry repartees; his wit was as sparkling as the champagne which in some degree inspired it, and as innocent. There was no touch of bitterness or satire in his polished and gentle humor; no envy or dislike pointed his quick, epigrammatic speech; but all was clear, light, and transparent, as the sunny air at noonday. Nor was his conversation altogether light and mirthful. There were at times bursts of high enthusiasm, at which he would himself laugh heartily a moment afterward—there were touches of passing romance and poetry blending in an under-current with his fluent mirth; and, above all, there was an evident strain of right feeling, of appreciation of all that was great and generous and good, predominant above romance and wit, perceptible in every word he uttered.

And Agnes listened, and laughed, and flung back skillfully and cleverly the ball of conversation, as he tossed it to her. She was pleased, it was evident, and amused. But she was pleased only as with a clever actor, a brilliant performer on some new instrument now heard for the first time. The gay, wild humor of the young man hit her fancy; his mad wit struck a kindred chord in her mind; but the latent poetry and romance passed unheeded, and the noblest point of all, the good and gracious feelings, made no impression on the polished but hard surface of the bright maiden’s heart.

Meantime, how fared the peer with the calmer and gentler sister? Less brilliant than George Delawarr, he had traveled much, had seen more of men and things, had a more cultivated mind, was more of a scholar, and no less of a gentleman, scarce less perhaps of a soldier; for he had served a campaign or two in his early youth in the Low Countries.

He was a noble and honorable man, clever, and eloquent, and well esteemed—a little, perhaps, spoiled by that good esteem, a little too confident of himself, too conscious of his own good mien and good parts, and a little hardened, if very much polished, by continual contact with the world.

He was, however, an easy and agreeable talker, accustomed to the society of ladies, in which he was held to shine, and fond of shining. He exerted himself also that night, partly because he was really struck with Blanche’s grace and beauty, partly because Delawarr’s liveliness and wit excited him to a sort of playful rivalry.

Still, he was not successful; for though Blanche listened graciously, and smiled in the right places, and spoke in answer pleasantly and well, when she did speak, and evidently wished to appear and to be amused; her mind was at times absent and distracted, and it could not long escape the observation of so thorough a man of the world as Lord St. George, that he had not made that impression on the young country damsel which he was wont to make, with one half the effort, on what might be supposed more difficult ladies.

But though he saw this plainly, he was too much of a gentleman to be either piqued or annoyed; and if any thing he exerted himself the more to please, when he believed exertion useless; and by degrees his gentle partner laid aside her abstraction, and entered into the spirit of the hour with something of her sister’s mirth, though with a quieter and more chastened tone.

It was a pleasant party, and a merry evening; but like all other things, merry or sad, it had its end, and passed away, and by many was forgotten; but there were two persons present there who never while they lived forgot that evening—for there were other two, to whom it was indeed the commencement of the end.

But the hour for parting had arrived, and with the ceremonious greetings of those days, deep bows and stately courtesies, and kissing of fair hands, and humble requests to be permitted to pay their duty on the following day, the cavaliers and ladies parted.

When the two gallants stood together in the great hall, George Delawarr turned suddenly to the peer—

“Where the deuce are you going to sleep to-night, St. George? You came down hither all the way from London, did you not? You surely do not mean to return to-night.”

“I surely do not wish it, you mean, George. No, truly. But I do mean it. For my fellows tell me that there is not a bed to be had for love, which does not at all surprise me, or for money, which I confess does somewhat, in Eton, Slough, or Windsor. And if I must go back to Brentford or to Hounslow, as well at once to London.”

“Come with me! Come with me, St. George. I can give you quarters in the barracks, and a good breakfast, and a game of tennis if you will; and afterward, if you like, we’ll ride over and see how these bright-eyed beauties look by daylight, after all this night-work.”

“A good offer, George, and I’ll take it as it is offered.”

“How are you here? In a great lumbering coach I suppose. Well, look you, I have got two horses here; you shall take mine, and I’ll ride on my fellow’s, who shall go with your people and pilot them on the road, else they’ll be getting that great gilded Noah’s ark into Datchet-ditch. Have you got any tools? Ay! ay! I see you travel well equipped, if you do ride in your coach. Now your riding-cloak, the nights are damp here, by the river-side, even in summer; oh! never mind your pistols, you’ll find a brace in my holsters, genuine Kuchenreuters. I can hit a crown piece with them, for a hundred guineas, at fifty paces.”

“Heaven send that you never shoot at me with them, if that’s the case, George.”

“Heaven send that I never shoot at any one, my lord, unless it be an enemy of my king and country, and in open warfare; for so certainly as I do shoot I shall kill.”

“I do not doubt you, George. But let’s be off. The lights are burning low in the sockets, and these good fellows are evidently tired out with their share of our festivity. Fore Gad! I believe we are the last of the guests.”

And with the word, the young men mounted joyously, and galloped away at the top of their horses’ speed to the quarters of the life-guard in Windsor.

Half an hour after their departure, the two sisters sat above stairs in a pleasant chamber, disrobing themselves, with the assistance of their maidens, of the cumbrous and stiff costumes of the ball-room, and jesting merrily over the events of the evening.

“Well, Blanche,” said Agnes archly, “confess, siss, who is the lord paramount, the beau par excellence, of the ball? I know, you demure puss! After all, it is ever the quiet cat that licks the cream. But to think that on your very first night you should have made such a conquest. So difficult, too, to please, they say, and all the great court ladies dying for him.”

“Hush! madcap. I don’t know who you mean. At all events, I have not danced four dances in one evening with one cavalier. Ah! have I caught you, pretty mistress?”

“Oh! that was only poor George Delawarr. A paltry cornet in the guards. He will do well enough to have dangling after one, to play with, while he amuses one—but fancy, being proud of conquering poor George! His namesake with the Saint before it were worth a score of such.”

“Fie, sister!” said Blanche, gravely. “I do not love to hear you talk so. I am sure he’s a very pretty gentleman, and has twice as much head as my lord, if I’m not mistaken; and three times as much heart.”

“Heart, indeed, siss! Much you know about hearts, I fancy. But, now that you speak of it, I will try if he has got a heart. If he has, he will do well to pique some more eligible—”

“Oh! Agnes, Agnes! I cannot hear you—”

“Pshaw!” interrupted the younger sister, very bitterly, “this affectation of sentiment and disinterestedness sits very prettily on the heiress of Ditton-in-the-Dale, Long Netherby, and Waltham Ferrers, three manors, and ten thousand pounds a year to buy a bridegroom! Poor I, with my face for my fortune, must needs make my wit eke out my want of dowry. And I’m not one, I promise you, siss, to choose love in a cottage. No, no! Give me your Lord St. George, and I’ll make over all my right and title to poor George Delawarr this minute. Heigho! I believe the fellow is smitten with me after all. Well, well! I’ll have some fun with him before I have done yet.”

“Agnes,” said Blanche, gravely, but reproachfully, “I have long seen that you are light, and careless whom you wound with your wild words, but I never thought before that you were bad-hearted.”

“Bad-hearted, sister!”

“Yes! bad-hearted! To speak to me of manors, or of money, as if for fifty wills, or five hundred fathers, I would ever profit by a parent’s whim to rob my sister of her portion. As if I would not rather lie in the cold grave, than that my sister should have a wish ungratified, which I had power to gratify, much less that she should narrow down the standard of her choice—the holiest and most sacred thing on earth—to the miserable scale of wealth and title. Out upon it! out upon it! Never, while you live, speak so to me again!”

“Sister, I never will. I did not mean it, sister, dear,” cried Agnes, now much affected, as she saw how vehemently Blanche was moved. “You should not heed me. You know my wild, rash way, and how I speak whatever words come first.”

“Those were very meaning words, Agnes—and very bitter, too. They cut me to the heart,” cried the fair girl, bursting into a flood of passionate tears.

“Oh! do not—do not, Blanche. Forgive me, dearest! Indeed, indeed, I meant nothing!”

“Forgive you, Agnes! I have nothing to forgive. I was not even angry, but pained, but sorry for you, sister; for sure I am, that if you give way to this bitter, jealous spirit, you will work much anguish to yourself, and to all those who love you.”

“Jealous, Blanche!”

“Yes, Agnes, jealous! But let us say no more. Let this pass, and be forgotten; but never, dear girl, if you love me, as I think you do, never so speak to me again.”

“I never, never will.” And she fell upon her neck, and kissed her fondly, as her heart relented, and she felt something of sincere repentance for the harsh words which she had spoken, and the hard, bitter feelings which suggested them.

Another hour, and, clasped in each others’ arms, they were sleeping as sweetly as though no breath of this world’s bitterness had ever blown upon their hearts, or stirred them into momentary strife.

Peace to their slumbers, and sweet dreams!

It was, perhaps, an hour or two after noon, and the early dinner of the time was already over, when the two sisters strolled out into the gardens, unaccompanied, except by a tall old greyhound, Blanche’s peculiar friend and guardian, and some two or three beautiful silky-haired King Charles spaniels.

After loitering for a little while among the trim parterres, and box-edged terraces, and gathering a few sweet summer flowers, they turned to avoid the heat, which was excessive, into the dark elm avenue, and wandered along between the tall black yew hedges, linked arm-in-arm, indeed, but both silent and abstracted, and neither of them conscious of the rich melancholy music of the nightingales, which was ringing all around them in that pleasant solitude.

Both, indeed, were buried in deep thought; and each, perhaps, for the first time in her life, felt that her thought was such that she could not, dared not, communicate it to her sister.

For Blanche Fitz-Henry had, on the previous night, begun, for the first time in her life, to suspect that she was the owner, for the time being, of a commodity called a heart, although it may be that the very suspicion proved in some degree that the possession was about to pass, if it were not already passing, from her.

In sober seriousness, it must be confessed that the young cornet of the Life Guards, although he had made so little impression on her to whom he had devoted his attentions, had produced an effect different from any thing which she had ever felt before on the mind of the elder sister. It was not his good mien, nor his noble air that had struck her; for though he was a well-made, fine-looking man, of graceful manners, and high-born carriage, there were twenty men in the room with whom he could not for five minutes have sustained a comparison in point of personal appearance.

His friend, the Viscount St. George, to whom she had lent but a cold ear, was a far handsomer man. Nor was it his wit and gay humor, and easy flow of conversation, that had captivated her fancy; although she certainly did think him the most agreeable man she had ever listened to. No, it was the under-current of delicate and poetical thought, the glimpses of a high and noble spirit, which flashed out at times through the light veil of reckless merriment, which, partly in compliance with the spirit of the day, and partly because his was a gay and mirthful nature, he had superinduced over the deeper and grander points of his character. No; it was a certain originality of mind, which assured her that, though he might talk lightly, he was one to feel fervently and deeply—it was the impress of truth, and candor, and high independence, which was stamped on his every word and action, that first riveted her attention, and, in spite of her resistance, half fascinated her imagination.

This it was that had held her abstracted and apparently indifferent, while Lord St. George was exerting all his powers of entertainment in her behalf; this it was that had roused her indignation at hearing her sister speak so slightingly, and, as it seemed to her, so ungenerously of one whom she felt intuitively to be good and noble.

This it was which now held her mute and thoughtful, and almost sad; for she felt conscious that she was on the verge of loving—loving one who, for aught that he had shown as yet, cared naught for her, perhaps even preferred another—and that other her own sister.

Thereupon her maiden modesty rallied tumultuous to the rescue, and suggested the shame of giving love unasked, giving it, perchance, to be scorned—and almost she resolved to stifle the infant feeling in its birth, and rise superior to the weakness. But when was ever love vanquished by cold argument, or bound at the chariot-wheels of reason.

The thought would still rise up prominent, turn her mind to whatever subject she would, coupled with something of pity at the treatment which he was like to meet from Agnes, something of vague, unconfessed pleasure that it was so, and something of secret hope that his eyes would erelong be opened, and that she might prove, in the end, herself his consoler.

And what, meanwhile, were the dreams of Agnes? Bitter—bitter, and black, and hateful. Oh! it is a terrible consideration, how swiftly evil thoughts, once admitted to the heart, take root and flourish, and grow up into a rank and poisonous crop, choking the good grain utterly, and corrupting the very soil of which they have taken hold. There is but one hope —but one! To tear them from the root forcibly, though the heart-strings crack, and the soul trembles, as with a spiritual earthquake. To nerve the mind firmly and resolutely, yet humbly withal, and contritely, and with prayer against temptation, prayer for support from on high—to resist the Evil One with the whole force of the intellect, the whole truth of the heart, and to stop the ears steadfastly against the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.

But so did not Agnes Fitz-Henry. It is true that on the preceding night her better feelings had been touched, her heart had relented, and she had banished, as she thought, the evil counsellors, ambition, envy, jealousy, and distrust, from her spirit.

But with the night the better influence passed away, and ere the morning had well come, the evil spirit had returned to his dwelling place, and brought with him other spirits, worse and more wicked than himself.

The festive scene of the previous evening had, for the first time opened her eyes fairly to her own position; she read it in the demeanor of all present; she heard it in the whispers which unintentionally reached her ears; she felt it intuitively in the shade—it was not a shade, yet she observed it—of difference perceptible in the degree of deference and courtesy paid to herself and to her sister.

She felt, for the first time, that Blanche was every thing, herself a mere cipher—that Blanche was the lady of the manor, the cynosure of all eyes, the queen of all hearts, herself but the lady’s poor relation, the dependent on her bounty, and at the best a creature to be played with, and petted for her beauty and her wit, without regard to her feelings, or sympathy for her heart.

And prepared as she was at all times to resist even just authority with insolent rebellion; ready as she was always to assume the defensive, and from that the offensive against all whom she fancied offenders, how angrily did her heart now boil up, how almost fiercely did she muster her faculties to resist, to attack, to conquer, to annihilate all whom she deemed her enemies—and that, for the moment, was the world.

Conscious of her own beauty, of her own wit, of her own high and powerful intellect, perhaps over-confident in her resources, she determined on that instant that she would devote them all, all to one purpose, to which she would bend every energy, direct every thought of her mind—to her own aggrandizement, by means of some great and splendid marriage, which should set her as far above the heiress of Ditton-in-the-Dale, as the rich heiress now stood in the world’s eye above the portionless and dependent sister.

Nor was this all—there was a sterner, harder, and more wicked feeling yet, springing up in her heart, and whispering the sweetness of revenge—revenge on that amiable and gentle sister, who, so far from wronging her, had loved her ever with the tenderest and most affectionate love, who would have sacrificed her dearest wishes to her welfare—but whom, in the hardness of her embittered spirit, she could now see only as an intruder upon her own just rights, a rival on the stage of fashion, perhaps in the interests of the heart—whom she already envied, suspected, almost hated.

And Blanche, at that self-same moment, had resolved to keep watch on her own heart narrowly, and to observe her sister’s bearing toward George Delawarr, that in case she should perceive her favoring his suit, she might at once crush down the germ of rising passion, and sacrifice her own to her dear sister’s happiness.

Alas! Blanche! Alas! Agnes!

Thus they strolled onward, silently and slowly, until they reached the little green before the summer-house, which was then the gayest and most lightsome place that can be imagined, with its rare paintings glowing in their undimmed hues, its gilding bright and burnished, its furniture all sumptuous and new, and instead of the dark funereal ivy, covered with woodbine and rich clustered roses. The windows were all thrown wide open to the perfumed summer air, and the warm light poured in through the gaps in the tree-tops, and above the summits of the then carefully trimmed hedgerows, blithe and golden.

They entered and sat down, still pensive and abstracted; but erelong the pleasant and happy influences of the time and place appeared to operate in some degree on the feelings of both, but especially on the tranquil and well-ordered mind of the elder sister. She raised her head suddenly, and was about to speak, when the rapid sound of horses’ feet, unheard on the soft sand until they were hard by, turned her attention to the window, and the next moment the two young cavaliers, who were even then uppermost in her mind, came into view, cantering along slowly on their well-managed chargers.

Her eye was not quicker than those of the gallant riders, who, seeing the ladies, whom they had ridden over to visit, sitting by the windows of the summer-house, checked their horses on the instant, and doffed their plumed hats.

“Good faith, fair ladies, we are in fortune’s graces to-day,” said the young peer, gracefully, “since having ridden thus far on our way to pay you our humble devoirs, we meet you thus short of our journey’s end.”

“But how are we to win our way to you,” cried Delawarr, “as you sit there bright chatelaines of your enchanted bower—for I see neither fairy skiff, piloted by grim-visaged dwarfs, to waft us over, nor even a stray dragon, by aid of whose broad wings to fly across this mimic moat, which seems to be something of the deepest?”

“Oh! gallop on, gay knights,” said Agnes, smiling on Lord St. George, but averting her face somewhat from the cornet, “gallop on to the lodges, and leaving there your coursers, take the first path on the left hand, and that will lead you to our presence; and should you peradventure get entangled in the hornbeam maze, why, one of us two will bring you the clue, like a second Ariadne. Ride on and we will meet you. Come, sister, let us walk.”

Blanche had as yet scarcely found words to reply to the greeting of the gallants, for the coincidence of their arrival with her own thoughts had embarrassed her a little, and she had blushed crimson as she caught the eye of George Delawarr fixed on her with a marked expression, beneath which her own dropped timidly. But now she arose, and bowing with an easy smile, and a few pleasant words, expressed her willingness to abide by her sister’s plan.

In a few minutes the ladies met their gallants in the green labyrinth of which Agnes had spoken, and falling into pairs, for the walk was too narrow to allow them all four to walk abreast, they strolled in company toward the Hall.

What words they said, I am not about to relate—for such conversations, though infinitely pleasant to the parties, are for the most part infinitely dull to third persons—but it so fell out, not without something of forwardness and marked management, which did not escape the young soldier’s rapid eye, on the part of Agnes, that the order of things which had been on the previous evening was reversed; the gay, rattling girl attaching herself perforce to the viscount, not without a sharp and half-sarcastic jest at the expense of her former partner, and the mild heiress falling to his charge.

George Delawarr had been smitten, it is true, the night before by the gayety and rapid intellect of Agnes, as well as by the wild and peculiar style of her beauty; and it might well have been that the temporary fascination might have ripened into love. But he was hurt, and disgusted even more than hurt, by her manner, and observing her with a watchful eye as she coquetted with his friend, he speedily came to the conclusion that St. George was right in his estimate of her character at least, although he now seemed to be flattered and amused by her evident prepossession in his favor.

He had not, it is true, been deeply enough touched to feel either pique or melancholy at this discovery, but was so far heart-whole as to be rather inclined to laugh at the fickleness of the merry jilt, than either to repine or to be angry.

He was by no means the man, however, to cast away the occasion of pleasure; and walking with so beautiful and soft a creature as Blanche, he naturally abandoned himself to the tide of the hour, and in a little while found himself engaged in a conversation, which, if less sparkling and brilliant, was a thousand times more charming than that which he had yesterday held with her sister.

In a short time he had made the discovery that with regard to the elder sister, too, his friend’s penetration had exceeded his own; and that beneath that calm and tranquil exterior there lay a deep and powerful mind, stored with a treasury of the richest gems of thought and feeling. He learned in that long woodland walk that she was, indeed, a creature both to adore and to be adored; and he, too, like St. George, was certain, that the happy man whom she should love, would be loved for himself alone, with the whole fervor, the whole truth, the whole concentrated passion of a heart, the flow of which once unloosed, would be but the stronger for the restraint which had hitherto confined it.

Erelong, as they reached the wider avenue, the two parties united, and then, more than ever, he perceived the immense superiority in all lovable, all feminine points, of the elder to the younger sister; for Agnes, though brilliant and seemingly thoughtless and spirit-free as ever, let fall full many a bitter word, many a covert taunt and hidden sneer, which, with his eyes now opened as they were, he readily detected, and which Blanche, as he could discover, even through her graceful quietude, felt, and felt painfully.

They reached the Hall at length, and were duly welcomed by its master; refreshments were offered and accepted—and the young men were invited to return often, and a day was fixed on which they should partake the hospitalities of Ditton, at least as temporary residents.

The night was already closing in when they mounted their horses and withdrew, both well pleased with their visit—for the young lord was in pursuit of amusement only, and seeing at a glance the coyness of the heiress, and the somewhat forward coquetry of her sister, he had accommodated himself to circumstances, and determined that a passing flirtation with so pretty a girl, and a short sejour at a house so well-appointed as Ditton, would be no unpleasant substitute for London in the dog-days; and George Delawarr, like Romeo, had discarded the imaginary love the moment he found the true Juliet. If not in love, he certainly was fascinated, charmed; he certainly thought Blanche the sweetest, and most lovely girl he had ever met, and was well inclined to believe that she was the best and most admirable. He trembled on the verge of his fate.

And she—her destiny was fixed already, and forever! And when she saw her sister delighted with the attentions of the youthful nobleman, she smiled to herself, and dreamed a pleasant dream, and gave herself up to the sweet delusion. She had already asked her own heart “does he love me?” and though it fluttered sorely, and hesitated for a while, it did not answer, “No!”

But as the gentlemen rode homeward, St. George turned shortly on his companion, and said, gravely,

“You have changed your mind, Delawarr, and found out that I am right. Nevertheless, beware! do not, for God’s sake, fall in love with her, or make her love you!”

The blood flushed fiery-red to the ingenuous brow of George Delawarr, and he was embarrassed for a moment. Then he tried to turn off his confusion with a jest.

“What, jealous, my lord! jealous of a poor cornet, with no other fortune than an honorable name, and a bright sword! I thought you, too, had changed your mind, when I saw you flirting so merrily with that merry brunette.”

“You did see me flirting, George—nothing more; and I have changed my mind, since the beginning, if not since the end of last evening—for I thought at first that fair Blanche Fitz-Henry would make me a charming wife; and now I am sure that she would not—”

“Why so, my lord? For God’s sake! why say you so?”

“Because she never would love me, George; and I would never marry any woman, unless I were sure that she both could and did. So you see that I am not the least jealous; but still I say, don’t fall in love with her—”

“Faith! St. George, but your admonition comes somewhat late—for I believe I am half in love with her already.”

“Then stop where you are, and go no deeper—for if I err not, she is more than half in love with you, too.”

“A strange reason, St. George, wherefore to bid me stop!”

“A most excellent good one!” replied the other, gravely, and almost sadly, “for mutual love between you two can only lead to mutual misery. Her father never would consent to her marrying you more than he would to her marrying a peasant—the man is perfectly insane on the subject of title-deeds and heraldry, and will accept no one for his son-in-law who cannot show as many quarterings as a Spanish grandee, or a German noble. But, of course, it is of no use talking about it. Love never yet listened to reason; and, moreover, I suppose what is to be is to be—come what may.”

“And what will you do, St. George, about Agnes? I think you are touched there a little!”

“Not a whit I—honor bright! And for what I will do—amuse myself, George—amuse myself, and that pretty coquette, too; and if I find her less of a coquette, with more of a heart than I fancy she has—” he stopped short, and laughed.

“Well, what then—what then?” cried George Delawarr.

“It will be time enough to decide then.”

“And so say I, St. George. Meanwhile, I too will amuse myself.”

“Ay! but observe this special difference—what is fun to you may be death to her, for she has a heart, and a fine, and true, and deep one; may be death to yourself—for you, too, are honorable, and true, and noble; and that is why I love you, George, and why I speak to you thus, at the risk of being held meddlesome or impertinent.”

“Oh, never, never!” exclaimed Delawarr, moving his horse closer up to him, and grasping his hand warmly, “never! You meddlesome or impertinent! Let me hear no man call you so. But I will think of this. On my honor, I will think of this that you have said!”

And he did think of it. Thought of it often, deeply—and the more he thought, the more he loved Blanche Fitz-Henry.

Days, weeks, and months rolled on, and still those two young cavaliers were constant visiters, sometimes alone, sometimes with other gallants in their company, at Ditton-in-the-Dale. And ever still, despite his companion’s warning, Delawarr lingered by the fair heiress’ side, until both were as deeply enamored as it is possible for two persons to be, both single-hearted, both endowed with powerful intellect, and powerful imagination; both of that strong and energetic temperament which renders all impressions permanent, all strong passions immortal. It was strange that there should have been two persons, and there were but two, who discovered nothing of what was passing—suspected nothing of the deep feelings which possessed the hearts of the young lovers; while all else marked the growth of liking into love, of love into that absolute and over-whelming idolatry, which but few souls can comprehend, and which to those few is the mightiest of blessings or the blackest of curses.

And those two, as is oftentimes the case, were the very two whom it most concerned to perceive, and who imagined themselves the quickest and the clearest sighted—Allan Fitz-Henry, and the envious Agnes.

But so true is it that the hope is oft parent to the thought, and the thought again to security and conviction, that, having in the first instance made up his mind that Lord St. George would be a most suitable successor to the name of the family, and secondly, that he was engaged in prosecuting his suit to the elder daughter, her father gave himself no further trouble in the matter, but suffered things to take their own course without interference.

He saw, indeed, that in public the viscount was more frequently the companion of Agnes than of Blanche; that there seemed to be a better and more rapid intelligence between them; and that Blanche appeared better pleased with George Delawarr’s than with the viscount’s company.

But, to a man blinded by his own wishes and prejudices, such evidences went as nothing. He set it down at once to the score of timidity on Blanche’s part, and to the desire of avoiding unnecessary notoriety on St. George’s; and saw nothing but what was perfectly natural and comprehensible, in the fact that the younger sister and the familiar friend should be the mutual confidents, perhaps the go-betweens, of the two acknowledged lovers.

He was in high good-humor, therefore; and as he fancied himself on the high-road to the full fruition of his schemes, nothing could exceed his courtesy and kindness to the young cornet, whom he almost over-powered with those tokens of affection and regard which he did not choose to lavish on the peer, lest he should be thought to be courting his alliance.

Agnes, in the meantime, was so busy in the prosecution of her assault on Lord St. George’s heart, on which she began to believe that she had made some permanent impression, that she was perfectly contented with her own position, and was well-disposed to let other people enjoy themselves, provided they did not interfere with her proceedings. It is true that, at times, in the very spirit of coquetry, she would resume her flirtation with George Delawarr, for the double purpose of piquing the viscount, and playing with the cornet’s affections, which, blinded by self-love, she still believed to be devoted to her pretty self.

But Delawarr was so happy in himself, that, without any intention of playing with Agnes, or deceiving her, he joked and rattled with her as he would with a sister, and believing that she must understand their mutual situation, at times treated her with a sort of quiet fondness, as a man naturally does the sister of his betrothed or his bride, which effectually completed her hallucination.

The consequence of all this was, that, while they were unintentionally deceiving others, they were fatally deceiving themselves likewise; and of this, it is probable that no one was aware, with the exception of St. George, who, seeing that his warnings were neglected, did not choose to meddle further in the matter, although keeping himself ready to aid the lovers to the utmost of his ability by any means that should offer.

In the innocence of their hearts, and the purity of their young love, they fancied that what was so clear to themselves, must be apparent to the eyes of others; and they flattered themselves that the lady’s father not only saw, but approved their affection, and that, when the fitting time should arrive, there would be no obstacle to the accomplishment of their happiness.

It is true that Blanche spoke not of her love to her sister, for, apart from the aversion which a refined and delicate girl must ever feel to touching on that subject, unless the secret be teased or coaxed out of her by some near and affectionate friend, there had grown up a sort of distance, not coldness, nor dislike, nor distrust, but simply distance, and lack of communication between the sisters since the night of the birth-day ball. Still Blanche doubted not that her sister saw and knew all that was passing in her mind, in the same manner as she read her heart; and it was to her evident liking for Lord St. George, and the engrossing claim of her own affections on all her thoughts, and all her time, that she attributed her carelessness of herself.

Deeply, however, did she err, and cruelly was she destined to be undeceived.

The early days of autumn had arrived, and the woods had donned their many-colored garments, when on a calm, sweet evening—one of those quiet and delicious evenings peculiar to that season—Blanche and George Delawarr had wandered away from the gay concourse which filled the gardens, and unseen, as they believed, and unsuspected, had turned into the old labyrinth where first they had begun to love, and were wrapped in soft dreams of the near approach of more perfect happiness.

But a quick, hard eye was upon them—the eye of Agnes; for, by chance, Lord St. George was absent, having been summoned to attend the king at Windsor; and being left to herself, her busy mind, too busy to rest for a moment idle, plunged into mischief and malevolence.

No sooner did she see them turn aside from the broad walk than the cloud was withdrawn, as if by magic, from her eyes; and she saw almost intuitively all that had previously escaped her.

Not a second did she lose, but stealing after the unsuspecting pair with a noiseless and treacherous step, she followed them, foot by foot, through the mazes of the clipped hornbeam labyrinth, divided from them only by the verdant screen, listening to every half-breathed word of love, and drinking in with greedy ears every passionate sigh.

Delawarr’s left arm was around Blanche’s slender waist, and her right hand rested on his shoulder; the fingers of their other hands were entwined lovingly together, as they wandered onward, wrapped each in the other, unconscious of wrong on their own part, and unsuspicious of injury from any other.

Meanwhile, with rage in her eyes, with hell in her heart, Agnes followed and listened.

So deadly was her hatred, at that moment, of her sister, so fierce and overmastering her rage, that it was only by the utmost exertion of self-control that she could refrain from rushing forward and loading them with reproaches, with contumely, and with scorn.

But biting her lips till the blood sprang beneath her pearly teeth, and clinching her hands so hard that the nails wounded their tender palms, she did refrain, did subdue the swelling fury of her rebellious heart, and awaited the hour of more deadly vengeance.

Vengeance for what? She had not loved George Delawarr—nay, she had scorned him! Blanche had not robbed her of her lover—nay, in her own thoughts, she had carried off the admirer, perhaps the future lover, from the heiress.

She was the wronger, not the wronged! Then wherefore vengeance?

Even, therefore, reader, because she had wronged her, and knew it; because her own conscience smote her, and she would fain avenge on the innocent cause, the pangs which at times rent her own bosom.

Envious and bitter, she could not endure that Blanche should be loved, as she felt she was not loved herself, purely, devotedly, forever, and for herself alone.

Ambitious, and insatiate of admiration, she could not endure that George Delawarr, once her captive, whom she still thought her slave, should shake off his allegiance to herself, much less that he should dare to love her sister.

Even while she listened, she suddenly heard Blanche reply to some words of her lover, which had escaped her watchful ears.

“Never fear, dearest George; I am sure that he has seen and knows all—he is the kindest and the best of fathers. I will tell him all to-morrow, and will have good news for you when you come to see me in the evening.”

“Never!” exclaimed the fury, stamping upon the ground violently—“by all my hopes of heaven, never!”

And with the words she darted away in the direction of the hall as fast as her feet could carry her over the level greensward; rage seeming literally to lend her wings, so rapidly did her fiery passions spur her on the road to impotent revenge.

Ten minutes afterward, with his face inflamed with fury, his periwig awry, his dress disordered by the haste with which he had come up, Allan Fitz-Henry broke upon the unsuspecting lovers.

Snatching his daughter rudely from the young man’s half embrace, he broke out into a torrent of terrible and furious invective, far more disgraceful to him who used it, than to those on whom it was vented.

There was no check to his violence, no moderation on his tongue. Traitor, and knave, and low-born beggar, were the mildest epithets which he applied to the high-bred and gallant soldier; while on his sweet and shrinking child he heaped terms the most opprobrious, the most unworthy of himself, whether as a father or as a man.

The blood rushed crimson to the brow of George Delawarr, and his hand fell, as if by instinct, upon the hilt of his rapier; but the next moment he withdrew it, and was cool by a mighty effort.

“From you, sir, any thing! You will be sorry for this to-morrow!”

“Never, sir! never! Get you gone! base domestic traitor! Get you gone, lest I call my servants, and bid them spurn you from my premises!”

“I go, sir—” he began calmly; but at this moment St. George came upon the scene, having just returned from Windsor, eager, but, alas! too late, to anticipate the shameful scene—and to him did George Delawarr turn with unutterable anguish in his eyes. “Bid my men bring my horses after me, St. George,” said he, firmly, but mournfully; “for me, this is no place any longer. Farewell, sir! you will repent of this. Adieu, Blanche, we shall meet again, sweet one.”

“Never! dog, never! or with my own hands—”

“Hush! hush! for shame. Peace, Mister Fitz-Henry, these words are not such as may pass between gentlemen. Go, George, for God’s sake! Go, and prevent worse scandal,” cried the viscount.

And miserable beyond all comprehension, his dream of bliss thus cruelly cut short, the young man went his way, leaving his mistress hanging in a deep swoon, happy to be for a while unconscious of her misery, upon her father’s arm.

Three days had passed—three dark, dismal, hopeless days. Delawarr did his duty with his regiment, nay, did it well—but he was utterly unconscious, his mind was afar off, as of a man walking in a dream. Late on the third night a small note was put into his hands, blistered and soiled with tears. A wan smile crossed his face, he ordered his horses at daybreak, drained a deep draught of wine, sauntered away to his own chamber, stopping at every two or three paces in deep meditation; threw himself on his bed, for the first time in his life without praying, and slept, or seemed to sleep, till daybreak.

Three days had passed—three dark, dismal, hopeless days! Blanche was half dead—for she now despaired. All methods had been tried with the fierce and prejudiced old man, secretly prompted by that demon-girl—and all tried in vain. Poor Blanche had implored him to suffer her to resign her birthright in favor of her sister, who would wed to suit his wishes, but in vain. The generous St. George had offered to purchase for his friend, as speedily as possible, every step to the very highest in the service; nay, he had obtained from the easy monarch a promise to raise him to the peerage, but in vain.

And Blanche despaired; and St. George left the Hall in sorrow and disgust that he could effect nothing.

That evening Blanche’s maid, a true and honest girl, delivered to her mistress a small note, brought by a peasant lad; and within an hour the boy went thence, the bearer of a billet, blistered and wet with tears.

And Blanche crept away unheeded to her chamber, and threw herself upon her knees, and prayed fervently and long; and casting herself upon her painful bed, at last wept herself to sleep.

The morning dawned, merry and clear, and light-some; and all the face of nature smiled gladly in the merry sunbeams.

At the first peep of dawn Blanche started from her restless slumbers, dressed herself hastily, and creeping down the stairs with a cautious step, unbarred a postern door, darted out into the free air, without casting a glance behind her, and fled, with all the speed of mingled love and terror, down the green avenue toward the gay pavilion—scene of so many happy hours.

But again she was watched by an envious eye, and followed by a jealous foot.

For scarce ten minutes had elapsed from the time when she issued from the postern, before Agnes appeared on the threshold, with her dark face livid and convulsed with passion; and after pausing a moment, as if in hesitation, followed rapidly in the footsteps of her sister.

When Blanche reached the summer-house, it was closed and untenanted; but scarcely had she entered and cast open the blinds of one window toward the road, before a hard horse-tramp was heard coming up at full gallop, and in an instant George Delawarr pulled up his panting charger in the lane, leaped to the ground, swung himself up into the branches of the great oak-tree, and climbing rapidly along its gnarled limbs, sprang down on the other side, rushed into the building, and cast himself at his mistress’ feet.

Agnes was entering the far end of the elm-tree walk as he sprang down into the little coplanade, but he was too dreadfully preoccupied with hope and anguish, and almost despair, to observe any thing around him.

But she saw him, and fearful that she should be too late to arrest what she supposed to be the lovers’ flight, she ran like the wind.

She neared the doorway—loud voices reached her ears, but whether in anger, or in supplication, or in sorrow, she could not distinguish.

Then came a sound that rooted her to the ground on which her flying foot was planted, in mute terror.

The round ringing report of a pistol-shot! and ere its echo had begun to die away, another!

No shriek, no wail, no word succeeded—all was as silent as the grave.

Then terror gave her courage, and she rushed madly forward a few steps, then stood on the threshold horror-stricken.

Both those young souls, but a few days before so happy, so beloved, and so loving, had taken their flight—whither?

Both lay there dead, as they had fallen, but unconvulsed, and graceful even in death. Neither had groaned or struggled, but as they had fallen, so they lay, a few feet asunder—her heart and his brain pierced by the deadly bullets, sped with the accuracy of his never-erring aim.

While she stood gazing, in the very stupor of dread, scarce conscious yet of what had fallen out, a deep voice smote her ear.

“Base, base girl, this is all your doing!” Then, as if wakening from a trance, she uttered a long, piercing shriek, darted into the pavilion between the gory corpses, and flung herself headlong out of the open window into the pool beneath.

But she was not fated so to die. A strong hand dragged her out—the hand of St. George, who, learning that his friend had ridden forth toward Ditton, had followed him, and arrived too late by scarce a minute.

From that day forth Agnes Fitz-Henry was a dull, melancholy maniac. Never one gleam of momentary light dispersed the shadows of her insane horror—never one smile crossed her lip, one pleasant thought relieved her life-long sorrow. Thus lived she; and when death at length came to restore her spirit’s light, she died, and made no sign.

Allan Fitz-Henry lived—a moody misanthropic man, shunning all men, and shunned of all. In truth, the saddest and most wretched of the sons of men.

How that catastrophe fell out none ever knew, and it were useless to conjecture.

They were beautiful, they were young, they were happy. The evil days arrived—and they were wretched, and lacked strength to bear their wretchedness. They are gone where ONE alone must judge them—may HE have pity on their weakness. Requiescant!

———

BY HENRY B. HIRST.

———

———

BY ALFRED B. STREET.

———

THAT WAS TO BE.

———

BY THE LATE JOSEPH C. NEAL.

———

“Now, Moggs—you Moggs—good Moggs—dear Moggs,” said his wife, running through the chromatic scale of matrimonial address, and modulating her words and her tones from irritation into tenderness—“yes, Moggs—that’s a good soul—I do wish for once you would try to be a little useful to your family. Stay at home to-day, Moggs, can’t you, while I do the washing? It would be so pleasant, Moggs—so like old times, to hear you whistling at your work, while I am busy at mine.”

And a smile of affection stole across the countenance of Mrs. Moggs, like a stray sunbeam on a cloudy day, breaking up the sharp and fixed lines of care into which her features had settled as a habitual expression, and causing her also to look as she did in the “old times,” to which she now so kindly referred.

“Wont you, Moggs?” added she, laying her hand upon his shoulder, “it would be so pleasant, dear—wouldn’t it? I should not mind hard work, Moggs, if you were at work near me.”

There was a tear, perhaps, twinkling in the eye of the wife, giving gentleness to the hard, stony look which she in general wore, caused by those unceasing troubles of her existence that leave no time for weeping. Perpetual struggle hardens the heart and dries up the source of tears.

“Wont you, Moggs?”

The idea of combined effort was a pleasant family picture to Mrs. Moggs, though it did involve not a little of toil. Still, to her loneliness it was a pleasant picture, accustomed as she had been to strive alone, and continually, to support existence. But it seems that perceptions of the pleasant and of the picturesque in such matters, differ essentially; and Moggs, glancing through the sentimental, and beyond it, felt determined, as he always did, to avoid the trouble which it threatened.

“Can’t be,” responded Moggs, slightly shrugging his shoulder, as a hint to his wife that the weight of her hand was oppressive. “Can’t be,” continued he, as he set himself industriously—for in this Moggs was industrious—to the consumption of the best part of the breakfast that was before him—a breakfast that had been, as usual, provided by his wife, and prepared by her, while Montezuma Moggs was fast asleep—an amusement to which, next to eating, Montezuma Moggs was greatly addicted when at home, as demanding the least possible effort and exertion on his part. Montezuma Moggs, you see, was in some respects not a little of an economist; and, as a rule, never made his appearance in the morning until firmly assured that breakfast was quite ready—“’most ready,” was too indefinite and vague for Montezuma Moggs—he had been too often tricked from comfort in that way before—people will so impose on one in this respect—envious people, who covet your slumbers—such as those who drag the covering off, or sprinkle water on the unguarded physiognomy. But Moggs took care, in the excess of his caution, that no time should be lost by him in a tedious interval of hungry expectation.

“Say ready—quite ready—and I’ll come,” muttered he, in that sleepy debate between bed and breakfast which often consumes so much of time; and his eyes remained shut and his mouth open until perfectly assured that all the preliminary arrangements had been completed. “Because,” as Moggs wisely observed, “that half hour before breakfast, reflecting on sausages and speculating on coffee, if there is sausages and coffee, frets a man dreadful, and does him more harm than all the rest of the day put together.”—Sagacious Moggs!

Besides, Moggs has a great respect for himself—much more, probably, than he has for other people, being the respecter of a person, rather than of persons, and that person being himself. Moggs, therefore, disdains the kindling of fires, splitting wood, and all that, especially of frosty mornings—and eschews the putting on of kettles—well knowing that if an individual is in the way when the aid of an individual is required, there is likely to be a requisition on the individual’s services. Montezuma Moggs understood how to “skulk;” and we all comprehend the fact that to “skulk” judiciously is a fine political feature, saving much of wear and tear to the body corporate.

“Mend boots—mind shop—tend baby!—can’t be,” repeated Moggs, draining the last drop from his cup—“boots, shops and babies must mend, mind and tend themselves—I’m going to do something better than that;” and so Moggs rose leisurely, took his hat, and departed, to stroll the streets, to talk at the corners, and to read the bulletin-boards at the newspaper offices, which, as Moggs often remarks, not only encourages literature, but is also one of the cheapest of all amusements—vastly more agreeable than if you paid for it.

It was a little shop, in one of the poorer sections of the city, where Montezuma Moggs resided with his family—Mrs. Moggs and five juveniles of that name and race—a shop of the miscellaneous order, in which was offered for sale a little, but a very little, of any thing, and every thing—one of those distressed looking shops which bring a sensation of dreariness over the mind, and which cause a sinking of the heart before you have time to ask why you are saddened—a frail and feeble barrier it seems against penury and famine, to yield at the first approach of the gaunt enemy—a shop that has no aspect of business about it, but compels you to think of distraining for rent, of broken hearts, of sickness, suffering and death.

It was a shop, moreover—we have all seen the like—with a bell to it, which rings out an announcement as we open the door, that, few and far between, there has been an arrival in the way of a customer, though it may be, as sometimes happens, that the bell, with all its untuned sharpness, fails to triumph over the din of domestic affairs in the little back-room, which serves for parlor, and kitchen, and hall, and proves unavailing to spread the news against the turbulent clamor of noisy children and a vociferous wife.

But be patient to the last—even if the bell does prove insufficient to attract due attention to your majestic presence, whether you come to make purchases or to avail yourself of the additional proffer made by the sign appertaining to Moggs exclusively, relative to “Boots and shoes mended,” collateral to which you observe a work-bench in the corner; still, be patient, and cause the energies of your heel to hold “wooden discourse” with the sanded floor, as emphatically you cry—

“Shop!” and beat with pennies on the counter.

Be patient; for, look ye, Mrs. Moggs will soon appear, with a flushed countenance and a soiled garb—her youngest hope, if a young Moggs is to be called a hope, sobbing loudly on its mother’s shoulder, while the unawed pratlers within, carry on the war with increasing violence.

“Shop!”

“Comin’!—what’s wanten?” is the sharp and somewhat discourteous reply, as Mrs. Moggs gives a shake of admonition to her peevish little charge, and turns half back to the riotous assemblage in the rear.

Now, we ask it of you as a special favor, that you do not suffer any shadow of offence to arise at the dash of acerbity that may manifest itself in the tones of Mrs. Montezuma Moggs. According to our notion of the world, as it goes, she, and such as she, deserve rather to be honored than to provoke wrath by the defects of an unpolished and unguarded manner. She has her troubles, poor woman—gnawing cares, to which, in all likelihood, yours are but as the gossamer upon the wind, or as the thistle-down floating upon the summer breeze; and if there be cash in your pocket, do not, after having caused such a turmoil, content yourself with simply asking where Jones resides, or Jenkins lives. It would be cruel—indeed it would. True, Mrs. Moggs expects little else from one of your dashing style and elegant appearance. Such a call rarely comes to her but with some profitless query; yet look around at the sparse candies, the withering apples, and the forlorn groceries—specimens of which are affixed to the window-panes in triangular patches of paste and paper—speak they not of poverty? Purchase, then, if it be but a trifle.

Mrs. Moggs, unluckily for herself, is possessed of a husband. Husbands, they say, are often regarded as desirable; and some of them are spoken of as if they were a blessing. But if the opinion of Mrs. Moggs were obtained on that score, it would probably be somewhat different; for be it known that the husband of Mrs. Moggs is of the kind that is neither useful nor ornamental. He belongs to that division which addicts itself mainly to laziness—a species of the biped called husband, which unfortunately is not so rare that we seek for the specimen only in museums. We know not whether Montezuma Moggs was or was not born lazy; nor shall we undertake to decide that laziness is an inherent quality; but as Mrs. Moggs was herself a thrifty, painstaking woman, as women, to their credit be it spoken, are apt to be, her lazy husband, as lazy husbands will, in all such cases, continued to grow and to increase in laziness, shifting every care from his own broad shoulders to any other shoulders, whether broad or narrow, strong or weak, that had no craven shrinkings from the load, Moggs contenting himself in an indolence which must be seen to be appreciated by those—husbands or wives—who perform their tasks in this great work-shop of human effort with becoming zeal and with conscientious assiduity, regarding laziness as a sin against the great purposes of their being. If this assumption be true, as we suspect it is, Montezuma Moggs has much to answer for; though it is a common occurrence, this falling back into imbecility, if there be any one at hand willing to ply the oar, as too often shown in the fact that the children of the industrious are willing to let their parents work, while the energetic wife has a drag upon her in the shape of a lounging husband.

Yes, Mrs. Moggs belongs to the numerous class of women who have what is well called “a trying time of it.” You may recognize them in the street, by their look of premature age—anxious, hollow-eyed, and worn to shadows. There is a whole history in every line of their faces, which tells of unceasing trouble, and their hard, quick movement as they press onward regardless of all that begirts the way, indicates those who have no thought to spare from their own immediate necessities, for comment upon the gay and flaunting world. Little does ostentation know, as it flashes by in satined arrogance and jeweled pride, of the sorrow it may jostle from its path; and perhaps it is happy for us as we move along in smiles and pleasantness, not to comprehend that the glance which meets our own comes from the bleakness of a withered heart—withered by penury’s unceasing presence.

Moggs is in fault—ay, Montezuma Moggs—what, he “mend boots, mind shop, tend baby,” bringing down his lofty aspirations for the future to be cabined within the miserable confines of the present!

“Hard work?” sneers Moggs—“yes, if a man sets himself down to hard work, there he may set—nothing else but hard work will ever come to him— but if he wont do hard work, then something easier will be sure to come toddlin’ along sooner or later. What can ever find you but hard work if you are forever in the shop, a thumpin’ and a hammerin’? Good luck never ventures near lap-stones and straps. I never saw any of it there in the whole course of my life; and I’m waitin’ for good luck, so as to be ready to catch it when it comes by.”

Montezuma Moggs had a turn for politics; and for many a year he exhibited great activity in that respect, believing confidently that good luck to himself might grow from town-meetings and elections; and you may have observed him on the platform when oratory addressed the “masses,” or on the election ground with a placard to his button, and a whole handfull of tickets. But his luck did not seem to wear that shape; and politically, Montezuma Moggs at last took his place in the “innumerable caravan” of the disappointed. And thus, in turn, has he courted fortune in all her phases, without a smile of recognition from the blinded goddess. The world never knows its noblest sons; and Montezuma Moggs was left to sorrow and despair.

Could he have been honored with a lofty commission, Montezuma Moggs might have set forth to a revel in the halls of his namesake; but as one of the rank and file, he could not think of it. And in private conversation with his sneering friend Quiggens, to whose captiousness and criticism Moggs submitted, on the score of the cigars occasionally derivable from that source, he ventured the subjoined remarks relative to his military dispositions:

“What I want,” said Moggs, “is a large amount of glory, and a bigger share of pay—a man like me ought to have plenty of both—glory, to swagger about with, while the people run into the street to stare at Moggs, all whiskers and glory—and plenty of pay, to make the glory shine, and to set it off. I wouldn’t mind, besides, if I did have a nice little wound or two, if they’ve got any that don’t hurt much, so that I might have my arm in a sling, or a black patch on my countenance. But if I was only one of the rank and file, I’m very much afraid I might have considerable more of knocks that would hurt a great deal, than I should of either the pay or the glory—that’s what troubles me in the milentary way. But make me a gineral, and then, I’ll talk to you about the matter—make me a gineral ossifer, with the commission, and the feathers, and the cocked-hat—plenty of pay, and a large slice of rations—there’s nothing like rations—and then I’ll talk to you like a book. Then I’ll pledge you my lives, and my fortunes, and my sacred honors—all of ’em—that I will furnish the genus whenever it is wanted—genus in great big gloves, monstrous long boots, and astride of a hoss that scatters the little boys like Boston, whenever I touch the critter with my long spurs, to astonish the ladies. Oh, get out!—do you think I couldn’t play gineral and look black as thunder, for such pay as ginerals get? I’d do it for half the money, and I’d not only do it cheaper, but considerable better than you ever see it done the best Fourth of July you ever met with. At present, I know I’ve not much rations, and no money at all—money’s skurse—but as for genus—look at my eye—isn’t genus there?—observation my nose—isn’t it a Boneyparte?—aint I sevagerous about the mouth?—I tell you, Quiggens, there’s whole lots of a hero in this little gentleman. I’ve so much genus that I can’t work. When a man’s genus is a workin’ in his upper story, and mine always is, then his hands has to be idle, so’s not to interrupt his genus.”

“Yes,” responded Quiggens, who is rather of the satirical turn, as one is likely to be who has driven the “Black Maria,” and has thus found out that the world is all a fleeting show; “yes, you’ve got so much genus in your upper story that it has made a hole in the crown of your hat, so it can see what sort of weather is going on out of doors—and it’s your genus, I reckon, that’s peeping out of your elbows. Why don’t you ask your genus to patch your knees, and to mend the holes in your boots?”

“Quiggens, go ’way, Quiggens—you’re of the common natur’, Quiggens—a vulgar fraction, Quiggens; and you can’t understand an indiwidooal who has a mind inside of his hat, and a whole soul packed away under his jacket. You’ll never rise, a flutterin’ and a ringin’ like a bald-headed eagle—men like you have got no wings, and can only go about nibblin’ the grass, while we fly up and peck cherries from the trees. I’m always thinkin’ on what I’m going to be, and a preparin’ myself for what natur’ intended, though I don’t know exactly what it is yet. But I don’t believe that sich a man as Montezuma Moggs was brought into the world only to put patches on shoes and to heel-tap people’s boots. No, Quiggens—no—it can’t be, Quiggens. But you don’t understand, and I’ll have to talk to my genus. It’s the only friend I have.”

“Why don’t you ask your genus to lend you a fip then, or see whether it’s got any cigars to give away,” replied Quiggs contemptuously, as he walked up the street, while Moggs, in offended majesty, stalked sulkily off in another direction.

“I would go somewheres, if I only knew where to go to,” soliloquized Moggs, as he strolled slowly along the deserted streets; “but when there’s nowheres to go to, then I suppose a person must go home—specially of cold nights like this, when the thermometer is down as far as Nero, and acts cruel on the countenance. It’s always colder, too, when there’s nobody about but yourself—you get your own share and every body else’s besides; and it’s lucky if you’re not friz. Why don’t they have gloves for people’s noses? I ought to have a carriage—yes, and horses—ay, and a colored gemman to drive ’em, to say nothing of a big house warmed all over, with curtains to the windows. And why haven’t I? Isn’t Montezuma Moggs as good as anybody—isn’t he as big—as full of genus? It’s cold now, a footin’ it round. But I’ll wait—perhaps there’s a good time comin’, boys—there must be a good time, for there isn’t any sort of times in the place where they keep time, which can be worse times than these times. But here’s home—here’s where you must go when you don’t know what to do with yourself. Whenever a man tells you he has nowheres to go to, or says he’s goin’ nowheres, that man’s a crawlin’ home, because he can’t help it. Well, well—there’s nothin’ else to be did, and so somebody must turn out and let me in home.”

It appeared, however, that Montezuma Moggs erred in part in this calculation. It is true enough that he knocked and knocked for admission at the door of his domicile; but the muscular effort thus employed seemed to serve no other purpose than that of exercise. Tired with the employment of his hands in this regard, Moggs resorted to his feet—then tried his knee, and anon his back, after the usual desperate variety of such appeal resorted to by the “great locked out,” when they become a little savage or so at the delay to which they are subjected. Sometimes, also, he would rap fiercely, and then apply his eye to the key-hole, as if to watch for the effect of his rapping. “I don’t see ’em,” groaned he. And then again, his ear would be placed against the lock—“I don’t hear ’em either.” There were moments when he would frantically kick the door, and then rush as frantically to the middle of the street, to look at the windows; but no sign of animation from within peered forth to cheer him. After full an hour of toil and of hope deferred, Montezuma Moggs tossed his arms aloft in despair—let them fall listlessly at his side, and then sat down upon the curb-stone to weep, while the neighbors looked upon him from their respective windows; a benevolent few, not afraid of catching cold, coming down to him with their condolements. None, however, offered a resting place to the homeless, unsheltered and despairing Moggs.

In the course of his musings and mournings, as he sat chattering with cold, a loosened paving-stone arrested his attention; and, with the instinct of genius, which catches comfort and assistance from means apparently the most trivial, and unpromising in their aspect, the paving-stone seemed to impart an idea to Montezuma Moggs, in this “his last and fearfulest extremity.” Grappling this new weapon in both his hands, he raised it and poised it aloft.

“I shall make a ten-strike now,” exclaimed he, as he lanched the missile at the door with herculean force, and himself remained in classic attitude watching the effect of the shot, as the door groaned, and creaked, and splintered under the unwonted infliction. Still, however, it did not give way before this application of force, though the prospect was encouraging. The observers laughed—Moggs chuckled—the dogs barked louder than before; and indeed it seemed all round as if a new light had been cast upon the subject.

“Hongcore!” cried somebody.

“I will,” said Moggs, preparing to demonstrate accordingly.

“Stop there,” said the voice of Mrs. Montezuma Moggs, as she raised the window, “if you hongcore the door of this ’ere house again, I’ll call the watch, to see what he thinks of such doings, I will. And now, once for all, you can’t come in here to-night.”

“Can’t, indeed!—why can’t I?—not come into my own house! Do you call this a free country, on the gineral average, if such rebellions are to be tolerated?”

“Your house, Mr. Moggs—yours?—who pays the rent, Moggs—who feeds you and the children, Moggs—who finds the fire and every thing else? Tell us that?”

This was somewhat of the nature of a home-thrust, and Moggs, rather conscience-stricken, was dumb-founded and appalled. Moggs was very cold, and therefore, for the time being, deficient in his usual pride and self-esteem, leaving himself more pervious to the assault of reproach from without and within, than he would have been in a more genial state of the atmosphere. No man is courageous when he is thoroughly chilled; and it had become painfully evident that this was not a momentary riot, but an enduring revolution, through the intermedium of a civil war.

“Ho, ho!” faintly responded Moggs, though once more preparing to carry the citadel by storm, “I’ll settle this business in a twinkling.”

Splash!

Any thing but cold water in quantity at a crisis like this. Who could endure a shower-bath under such ungenial circumstances? Not Priessnitz himself. It is not, then, to be wondered at that Montezuma Moggs now quailed, having nothing in him of the amphibious nature.

“Water is cheap, Mr. Moggs; and you’d better take keer. There’s several buckets yet up here of unkommon cold water, all of which is at your service without charge—wont ask you nothin’, Moggs, for your washin’; and if you’re feverish, may be it will do you good.”

Everybody laughed, as you know everybody will, at any other body’s misfortune or disaster. Everybody laughed but Moggs, and he shivered.

“I’ll sattinly ketch my death,” moaned he; “I’ll be friz, standing straight up, like a big icicle; or if I fall over when I’m friz, the boys will slide on me as they go to school, and call it fun as they go whizzing over my countenance with nails in their shoes, scratching my physimohogany all to pieces. They tell me that being friz is an easy death—that you go to sleep and don’t know nothing about it. I wish they’d get their wives to slouse ’em all over with a bucket of water, on sich a night as this, and then try whether it is easy. Call being friz hard an easy thing! I’d rather be biled any time. What shill I do—what shill I do?”

“Perhaps they’ll put you in an ice-house, and kiver you up with tan till summer comes—you’d be good for something then, which is more nor you are now,” observed Mrs. Moggs from the window.

“Quit twitting a man with his misfortunes,” whined Montezuma, of the now broken-heart.

“Why, my duck!”

“Y-e-e-s—y-e-e-s! that’s it—I am a duck, indeed! but by morning I’ll be only a snow-ball—the boys will take my head for a snow-ball. What shill I do—I guvs up, and I guvs in.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Montezuma Moggs, what you must do to be thawed. Promise me faithfully only to work half as hard as I do, and you may come to the fire—the ten-plate stove is almost red-hot. Promise to mend boots, mind shop, and tend baby; them’s the terms—that’s the price of admission.”

Hard terms, certainly—the severest of terms—but then hard terms, and severe terms, are good terms, if no other terms are to be had. One must do the best he can in this world, if it be imperative upon him to do something, as it evidently was in Moggs’ case.

“I promise,” shivered Moggs.

“Promise what?”

“T-t-to tend baby, m-m-mind shop, and m-m-mend boots;” and the vanquished Moggs sank down exhausted, proving, beyond the possibility of doubt, that cold water, when skillfully applied of a cold night, is the sovereignest thing on earth for the cure of “genus” in its lazier branches.

It is but justice, however, to state, that Moggs kept his word faithfully, in which he contradicted the general expectation, which, with reason enough in the main, places but little reliance on promises; and he became, for him, quite an industrious person. His wife’s buckets served as a continual remembrancer. But Mrs. Moggs never exulted over his defeat; and, though once compelled to harshness, continued to be to Montezuma a most excellent wife. The shop looks lively now—and the bell to the door is removed; for Moggs, with his rat-tat-tat, is ever at his post, doing admired execution on the dilapidated boots and shoes. The Moggses prosper, and all through the efficacy of a bucket of cold water. We should not wonder if, in the end, the Moggs family were to become rich, through the force of industry, and without recourse to “genus.”

“Politics and me has shuck hands forever,” said the repentant Moggs. “I’ve been looking out and expecting loaves and fishes long enough. Loaves, indeed! Why I never got even a cracker, unless it was aside of the ear, when there was a row on the election ground; and as for fishes, why, if I’d stopped any longer for them to come swimming up to my mouth, all ready fried, with pepper on ’em, I wouldn’t even have been decent food for fishes myself. I never got a nibble, let alone a bite; but somebody else always cotch’d the fish, and asked me to carry ’em home for them. Fact is, if people wont wote for me, I wont wote for people. And as for the milentary line, I give up in a gineral way, all idea of being a gineral ossifer. Bonyparte is dead, and if my milentary genus was so great that I couldn’t sleep for it, who’d hunt me up and put me at the head of affairs? No, if I’m wanted for any thing, they’ll have to call me. I’ve dodged about winkin’ and noddin’ as long as the country had any right to expect, and now—rat-tat-tat—I’m going to work for myself.”

It was a wise conclusion on the part of Moggs, who may, perchance, in this way, be a “gineral” yet.

———

BY ALICE G. LEE.

———

OR A MARRIAGE DE CONVENANCE.

———

BY ANGELE DE V. HULL.

———

In a large but somewhat scantily furnished apartment sat two young girls, in such earnest and apparently serious conversation that, but for their youthful and blooming countenances, one might have fancied them bending beneath the cares and sorrows of age. On the dark old table between them rested a magnificent work-box, whose rich implements they had been busily and skillfully using; but now the scissors and thread lay at their feet, their needles were dropped, and the younger of the two sat with clasped hands, while her companion’s low tones appeared to awaken every emotion of her heart.

On the old-fashioned French bedstead were thrown dresses of various hues and expensive stuffs, while one only, a robe of the most delicate material, its graceful folds looped with orange flowers, seemed to attract the attention of the fair, fragile being, whose attitude was one of intense suffering. Her bright hopes had faded at sight of that colorless garb, and the bridal wreath was to wither on her brow! What to her sad soul were the costly things before her? The jewels that sparkled on their snow-white satin case, the long fairy veil of beautiful lace that lay side by side with the bridal dress?

Her companion continued speaking, and she bowed her face upon those clasped hands, while her slight frame shook with its contending emotions. A few moments more and she raised her head. She was pale, and her large, dark eyes dilated into fearful size. At length the big drops came slowly down her cheek, and she was able to speak.

“No more, Angela, no more! You love me, I know; but what you have done to day was no act of friendship. You have troubled the dark waters of my soul until they have become a torrent over which I have no control.”

“And it is because I love you, Pauline, that I have made your future life manifest to you. Do not seek to make a merit of obedience to your proud mother’s will. It is because you have been taught to fear her, that you have consented to perjure yourself, and marry a man you cannot love.”

“For the love of heaven, spare me!” cried the girl, shrinking from her friend’s words, “Is it to triumph over me that you thus seek to move me?”

Her friend gazed mournfully upon her, and rising from her seat, gently put her arm around her.

“My poor Pauline! my dear Pauline!” murmured she, “I have been cruel—forgive me.”

Her answer was a fervent embrace—and throwing their arms round one another, they wept in silence.

At this moment the door opened, and a lady entered. She was tall and majestic, but there was an expression of pride and extreme hauteur on her countenance. She wore a handsome but faded dress, and the somewhat high-crowned cap bespoke a love of former fashions. She had a foreign air, and when she addressed her daughter, it was in French.

“How is this!” cried she, angrily. “What scenes are these, Pauline? As often as I enter your room I find you in tears. Is it to your advice, Mademoiselle Percy, that my daughter owes her red eyes?”

Angela was about to reply, but Pauline waved her back.

“Is it, then, a crime to weep, mamma? If there were no tears, the heart would break.”

“It is a crime, Pauline, to resist the will of your mother, when she has provided for your happiness in a manner suitable to your rank and birth. It is a crime to break the fifth commandment, which tells you to honor and obey your mother.”

“And have I not done both,” cried Pauline, indignantly. “Have you not sold my happiness? Have you not bartered perhaps my eternal welfare, that I might lay my aching head upon the downy pillows of the rich, that you might see me a wretched slave, writhing under chains not the less heavy because they are of gold?”

“Have you been reading Racine this morning? Or have you been studying for the stage?” said Madame Dumesnil, in a cold, scornful tone. “You are a good actress, certainly.”

Pauline sank upon a chair, and her friend stood beside her, pressing her trembling hand. Her mother advanced and stood before her.

“We will have no more of this, Pauline. If I feel satisfied that my duty is done, you should rejoice in obeying me. I alone am the judge in this matter—children should ever be contented with allowing their parents to act for them; and allow me to say, that any interference of strangers upon an occasion like this, is exceedingly misplaced.”

This was aimed at Angela Percy; but she only replied by a wondering and mournful gaze to the stern, cold woman before her. The old lady proceeded.

“Bathe your eyes, Pauline, and arrange your hair. Monsieur de Vaissiere is below. Perhaps,” added she, with a sneer, “perhaps that Miss Percy will assist you in entertaining your lover.”

Pauline started and shuddered, but by this time she had again yielded to her mother’s influence. Going to the glass, she smoothed her dark hair, and endeavored to abate the swelling of her eyes. Bidding farewell to her friend, she descended to the parlor, where her affianced husband awaited her.

He was tall, and his appearance distingué; but he, too, looked stern and cold as he rose to meet that young creature, whose nineteen summers were more than doubled by his years. He was handsome also; but where was the youthful ardor that should have been roused at the idea of winning that fair girl’s love? Where were the sunny hopes to meet hers, the dreams of the future that he wanted? His willingness to accept the sacrifice was no proof of his gentleness; and the cheek of his betrothed grew pale, and her hand was cold, as he led her to a seat.

Pauline had been bred to the hard forcing-school of the ancien régime. Her mother had left France on the terrible death of her beloved queen, Marie Antoinette, and had passed from the high post of dame d’honneur, to poverty and exile in America. The sale of her magnificent jewels and massive silver, had enabled her to lease an old roomy mansion, deserted by its owners, and to live in peace and retirement. Here, with the recollection of the horrors of the revolution fresh within her memory, while her heart was still bleeding with the wounds it had received; while she still had before her the mangled remains of her sovereigns—the bleeding head of her husband, torn from her in the days of their early love; in the midst of these agonizing thoughts, she gave birth to a posthumous child—the heroine of our story. Clasping her babe to her breast, Madame Dumesnil bitterly recalled the many plans of happiness her murdered husband had made in anticipation of its coming—his affection for her—his anxiety for her safety—their parting, and the subsequent news of his execution. Those lips were mute whose words of tenderness were to soothe her in her hour of suffering; that hand was cold that would have rested on her brow; that heart was still that would have bounded with a father’s love at sight of the tiny, helpless creature that lay upon her arm.

Madame Dumesnil, the young, the lovely, and the gentle, became silent, reserved, and harsh. Nothing could swerve her from a determination made, and with feelings of the deepest parental affection for her daughter, she had crushed and broken her spirit in the sweet spring-time of her childhood.

From the time Pauline was old enough to form a desire, she learned to hear it opposed. “Une petite fille attend qu’on lui donne se qui lui faut,” was the invariable reply to all her childish longings. According to the old French system, every slight offence was followed by her mother’s “Allez vous coucher, mademoiselle;” so that half her life was spent in bed, while she lay awake with the bright, broad daylight around her, the hour when other children are strengthening their little limbs in the active enjoyment of God’s free, fresh air.

As she grew older, she was taught that “une demoiselle bien elevée n’a pas d’opinions,” that her parents judged and decided for her; and while she sat erect upon a high stool, accomplishing her daily tasks in silence, her heart nearly burst with the pent-up feelings of her young imagination. Wherever she went her mother’s old waiting-woman was behind her. “Miss Pauline, hold yourself straight; Miss Pauline, turn out your feet—your head, mademoiselle—your arms!” Poor girl! she was well-nigh distracted with these incessant admonitions.

In her walks she met Angela Percy and her father. They had lately settled in the neighborhood, and having no acquaintances, gladly made advances to the timid Pauline. Nothing daunted by her shyness and reserve, Angela, some years her senior, persevered, and overcame it. She was an enthusiastic, high-minded girl, and soon pointed out to her companion new views and new ideas of the world from which she had been excluded. The intimacy was formed ere Madame Dumesnil could prevent it, and at the insistances of old Jeannette, who begged that Mademoiselle Pauline might have a friend of her own age—some one to talk to, besides two old women, she consented to allow the friendship to continue, provided Jeannette were present at every interview. This was easily promised, but the nurse’s stiff limbs were no match for the agile supple ones of her young charges. Day by day she loitered behind, while Pauline and Angela, with their arms entwined, continued in eager and undisturbed enjoyment of one another’s society. Jeannette remarked a glow upon her young lady’s cheek, and a light in her eye—new charms in her hitherto pale, resigned countenance; and, wiser than her mistress, concluded that the acquisition of a youthful friend was fast pouring happiness into her lonely heart.

Three years passed in this pleasant intercourse, when the monotony of their lives was broken by the arrival of an old friend of Madame Dumesnil—a Monsieur de Vaissiere. When they had last met, she was in the morning of her beauty and bliss, he a handsome youth, for whom many a fair one had sighed, and in vain—as he was still unmarried. What a change! He could not recognize the lovely young countess, whose marriage had been attended with so much éclat—so many rejoicings; nor could she see one vestige of the blooming countenance, the delicate profile, and the jet-black wavy locks that once shaded his fair, open brow. But these works of time were soon forgotten, and the desire of the proud, harsh mother was accomplished when, after a few weeks, M. de Vaissiere proposed for the hapless Pauline. Unconsciously, but with the thoughtlessness of selfishness, Madame Dumesnil sacrificed her child to her prejudices. M. de Vaissiere’s opinions and hers were the same; their admiration of le vieux systeme—their fond recollection of the unfortunate monarch, whose weakness they had never reproached him with, even in their secret souls—their abhorrence of Bonaparte—their contempt for la noblesse Napoleonne—their upturned noses at their adopted countrymen, les Americains—their want of faith in hearts and love—the sinecure-ism of young people—their presumption—their misfortune being that they were young and not born old—and finally, the coincidence of opinions wherein both looked upon the white-headed suitor as a most eligible husband for the young, the blooming, the beautiful Pauline.

M. de Vaissiere settled a dot upon his fiancée, and ordered a trousseau and a corbeille, not forgetting the cachemire. The preliminaries were arranged, the day hinted at, and Pauline was informed with a flourish of trumpets that her destiny was fixed.

She listened to her mother’s rhapsodies over the admirable parti Providence had enabled her to provide for her child in the wilderness of America; she heard her enlarge upon her own excellence as a parent, of the favor she had conferred upon her in bringing her into the world; of her consequent obligations, and the gratitude she owed her mother when she recollected that not content with giving her life, she had clothed, fed, and supported her until now. All this Pauline received in a silence that resembled stupor; but when M. de Vaissiere was again mentioned, she fell, with a scream of terror, at her mother’s feet.

In vain she wept and entreated; in vain she protested against the disparity of age, the utter want of congeniality, the absence of all affection, Madame Dumesnil was too much incensed to reply. With a gesture that Pauline well understood, (for it was used to express maledictions of every description,) she left the room, and locking the door, kept her daughter prisoner for the rest of the day.

She treated this resistance to her will as one of the unhappy consequences of living in a republican country. She suspected Angela of communicating American ideas of independence to her daughter, and would have added to her wretchedness by forbidding further intercourse between the two friends. But Jeannette again interfered; she knew that Pauline’s doom was sealed, and that it would be more than cruel to deprive her of the companion she loved. She herself carried the note that conveyed the intelligence of Pauline’s coming fate to the indignant Angela, and extended her walks that her poor young lady might derive what consolation she could from her friend’s willing sympathy. Many were the tears she shed, many the sighs that burst from her oppressed heart, as the poor old creature followed behind them. Once she had summoned courage sufficient to expostulate with her mistress upon the cruelty of her conduct to her daughter; but she was haughtily dismissed.

Every effort had been made, and at length Angela appealed to Pauline. She entreated her to be more firm, and to declare her resolution never to marry where she could not love.

“Rouse yourself, Pauline—the misery of a lifetime is before you, and it is not yet too late.”

“I have done every thing, Angela,” said Pauline, despairingly. “My doom is sealed, and I must bend to my bitter fate. I would fly, but that I could not survive my mother’s curse.”

“The curse of the unrighteous availeth naught,” replied her friend, solemnly. “Were you wrongfully opposing your mother’s will, mine would be the last voice to uphold you; but now your very soul is at stake.”

Pauline cast up her eyes in mute appeal to heaven. Her companion became excited as she proceeded, depicting the horrors of an unequal marriage. Pale and exhausted, her listener at length entreated her to forbear. She had been too long the slave of her mother’s wishes to oppose them now; she had been drilled into fear until it was a weakness. This her bold-hearted, energetic friend could not understand; and it was on her reproaching Pauline with moral cowardice that she, for the first time, resented what had in fact been patiently borne.

We have seen how kindly Angela forgave the accusation, and how she wept over the effect of her words. The sudden entrance of Madame Dumesnil put an end to the conversation, and the friends separated.

The next morning Angela was at Pauline’s side again. Silently she assisted in decorating the victim for the sacrifice. The bright jewels clasped her arm and neck; the long veil hung around her slender form; the orange wreath rested on the dark, dark tresses—and the dress was beautiful. But the bride! she was pale and ghastly, and her lips blue and quivering. Her eyes were void of all expression—those liquid, lustrous eyes; and ever and anon the large drops rolled over her face, oozing from the depths of her heart.

Poor Jeannette turned away, sobbing convulsively as the finishing touches were given to this sad bridal toilette. Angela remained firm and collected, but she, too, was pale; her cherished companion was gone from her forever—gone in such misery, too, that she almost prayed to see her the corpse she at that moment resembled.

Madame Dumesnil had remained below with the bridegroom and Mr. Percy, the sole witness to this ill-omened marriage. At length the hour came, Pauline was nearly carried down by Angela and Jeannette, and in a few moments bound forever to a man she loathed. The ceremony was ended, and the bride, with a convulsive sigh, fell back into the arms of her mother. Restoratives were procured, and at last she opened her eyes. They rested on the face of her friend, who hung over her in mute agony. Forcing a smile, which was taken by M. de Vaissiere for himself, Pauline arose, and hurried through her farewell. Her husband handed her into his carriage—and thus Pauline Dumesnil left her friends and her home.

Years had passed, and Pauline sat alone in her magnificent boudoir, the presiding deity of one of the finest hotels in Paris. Fortune had favored M. de Vaissiere. He had lived to rejoice over the downfall of the mighty Napoleon, and his mournful exile. He had returned to his beloved France, recovered his vast estates, and presented his young wife at court. His vanity was flattered at her gracious reception, and the admiration that followed her; his pride was roused, and, much against her will, Pauline found herself the centre of a gay circle that crowded her vast saloons as often as they were thrown open for the reception of her now numerous acquaintances.

It was on one of these evenings that Pauline sought the silence of her private apartment ere she gave herself up to her femme de chambre. Her loose peignoir of white satin was gathered round her, with a crimson cord tied negligently at the waist, and hanging, with its rich tassels of silver mixed, to the ground. Her hair had fallen over her shoulders, giving her a look of sadness that increased her beauty. Her eyes wandered around the room, and her lips parted into a melancholy smile, as she contemplated its delicate silk hangings, its heavy, costly furniture, her magnificent toilette, crowded with perfumes of every description, beautiful flacons, silver combs, and jewels that sparkled in and out of their cases. Her thoughts went back to her mother, whose pride had made her a childless, lonely widow; to Angela, whom she had so loved; to the misery of the day upon which they parted, perhaps forever—and her eyes were filled with tears that, rolling at length over her cheek, startled her as they fell upon her hand.

“And it was for this that I was sacrificed,” murmured she, bending her head. “My poor mother! could you see me here, you would feel that my happiness is secure; but, alas! how little you know of the human heart. This splendor lends weight to my chains, and makes me feel more desolate than ever! Night after night mingling in gay crowds, listening to honied words that fall unheeded on my ear; wearing smiles that come not from the heart, but help to break it; exposed to temptation, that makes me fear to mix with those of my own age; bound forever to a man whose only sentiment for me is one of pride—what part of happiness is mine?”

A sudden step aroused her, and her husband entered unannounced. He looked but little older. Time had dealt lightly with him, and with the aid of cosmetics and a perfect toilette, M. de Vaissiere stood a remarkable looking man—for his age.

“How is this, madame—not dressed yet! Have you no anxiety to see Mademoiselle Mars to night?”

“I have, indeed,” said Pauline, starting up and forcing a smile. “Is it so late, that I see you ready?”

“You must hasten Marie, or we shall be too late. How provoking! What can you do with that dishevelled hair? You have a bad habit of thinking—that is actually sinful. Why do you not take my example; I never reflect—it makes one grow old!”

She might have told him how her young life was embittered by the memory of days that were gone never to return; how she had grown old with thinking, and wore but the semblance of youth over a withered heart. But she had schooled herself to serenity with an effort almost superhuman—and seizing a silver bell at her side, she rang for her waiting woman.

“You must hasten, Marie—Monsieur de Vaissiere is already dressed. Bind up this hair beneath some net-work, my good girl; I have no time for embellishing this evening.”

“Madame is more beautiful without her usual coiffure,” said the girl, as she gathered up the dark tresses of her mistress. “I shall place her diamond aigrette in her hair, and she will turn all heads.”

“I have no such ambition, my good Marie,” said Pauline, laughing. “Give me my fan and gloves, and fasten this bracelet for me.”

“Tenez, madame,” said Marie, handing them; and Pauline ran down stairs, where her husband awaited her. He had just been fretted sufficiently to find fault with her dress.

“You never wear jewels enough. Do you think I bought them to ornament your boudoir?”

“I did not like to keep you waiting, mon ami. Shall I return and tell Marie to give me my necklace?”

“Yes, and your bracelet to match. Your white arm, madame, was made to ornament,” added M. de Vaissiere, assuming an air of gallantry.

Pauline smiled, and ran back to her boudoir. In a few moments she returned blazing with jewels, inwardly lamenting the display, but ever ready to grant her husband’s wish. He, too, smiled as she came forward, and taking her hand, led her to her carriage.

Shortly after they were seated, the door opened, and the young Vicomte de H—— entered the box. He placed himself behind Pauline, and remained there for the rest of the evening, in eager, animated conversation. He was not only one of the most agreeable men of the day, but added to wit and versatility of genius, a handsome face, graceful bearing, and a noble heart; and while Pauline yielded to the charms of so delightful a companion, full of the dreams and hopes of youth, uttering sentiments that years ago had been hers, her husband sat silent and moody beside her. A pang went through his heart as he gazed upon her bright countenance, and remembered her youth, whose sunshine was extinguished by her marriage with him. He looked at the smooth, full cheek of her companion, the purple gloss of his raven locks, the fire of his eye, and listening to his gay tones, his brilliant repartees, and enthusiastic expressions, pictured him with a shudder the husband of Pauline. What would have been her life compared to the one she led with him. How different would have been the bridal! He thought of her gentleness, her cheerful compliance with his wishes, her calm, subdued look, her lonely hours, the void that must be in her heart; and as all these things passed, for the first time, through his mind, he clasped his hands in despair.

He turned once more to look upon the wife he was but now beginning to appreciate. She, too, had fallen in a revery. Her beautiful head was bent, her long, dark lashes sweeping her cheek; and around her lips played a smile so sweet, that though he know her thoughts were far away in some pleasant wandering, he was sure he had no part in them.

For the first time since their wedded life, M. de Vaissiere was beginning to love his wife. He turned suddenly to look at the Vicomte de H——. He, too, was gazing upon Pauline with a look of intense admiration, but so full of pity and respect, that it made the jealous pang that thrilled through the husband’s frame less bitter—and with a deep sigh he turned to the stage. The play was one that gave him a lesson for the rest of his days. It represented a young girl like his Pauline, forced to wed one, like him, old enough to be her father. For a while all went smoothly; the giddy wife was dazzled by her jewels and her importance. But time passed, and she was roughly treated, her every wish thwarted, and her very servants taught to disobey her. Her angelic behaviour had no effect upon her brutal husband; her patience exasperated him. Wickedly he exposed her to temptation; and as he watched her mingle with those of her own age, and share their plans and pleasures, suspicion entered his mind. He removed her far from her friends, and intercepted her letters, making himself master of their contents, until by a series of persecutions he drove her to fly from him, and perish in the attempt.

Well for him was it that Monsieur de Vaissiere witnessed this play. How different might have been the effect of his newly awakened emotions, had they risen in the solitude of his apartment. The curtain fell, and Pauline looked up. Tears were standing in her eyes—for the fate of the heroine of the piece had affected her deeply, and her husband’s sympathy was with her when he remarked them. He waited until he saw her give her arm to the vicomte, and walked behind them, another creature. He had determined to win his wife’s love or die; to watch her, that he might warn her; to minister forever to her comforts.

The vicomte returned with them, and soon the splendid salon was crowded with guests. Pauline passed from one to the other with graceful, winning smiles; and her husband’s heart filled with pride and pleasure as he watched her, the object of admiration, glittering with diamonds, radiant with beauty, and remembered that she was his. Without a pang he saw the noble youth, whose coming had been to him salvation, lead her to supper, and seat himself at her side. He knew that she was pleased; he felt that she might have loved; but he knew, too, that she was as pure as an angel. How was it that suddenly her many virtues rose in array before him, and spoke to his heart?

One evening Pauline stood at the window overlooking the garden that was behind the Hotel de Vaissiere. The moonlight was glancing over the tops of the orange trees, and the perfume of their white blossoms came floating up like an incense of thanks to the Great Author of all, while fountains played beneath their shade, falling musically on the heart of the lonely watcher.

A shade was upon her brow—a shade of discontent; and busy were the thoughts that came creeping into her soul. She was judging her own heart—and bitterly did she reproach it as the image of another filled its space. Alas! she had feared this; and again she was roused into indignation as her mother’s stern will was recalled to her—and she was carried back to the day whereon she had reproached her with hazarding the eternal welfare of her child. Throwing herself upon her knees, she prayed for strength—and her prayer was heard. Suddenly, as if struck with some impulse, she hurried from the window, through the hall, passed the long suite of apartments, and reached her husband’s. Entering, she closed the door behind her, and rushed forward to M. de Vaissiere’s chair with such passionate rapidity, that one might have thought she feared to fail in her resolution.

Her sobs and tears had nearly deprived her of utterance, but falling at her husband’s feet, she confessed the momentary infidelity of her hitherto love-less heart, and besought him to take her from those scenes of gayety and temptation to some distant, quiet region, that she might expiate her fault in solitude.

Trembling she raised her eyes to his face. Instead of the fury, the reproaches she had expected, what was her surprise at seeing the tears coursing down his cheeks, to feel herself raised and clasped to his breast.

“My poor child!” said he, tenderly—and it was the first time he had ever so addressed her—“my poor child! I should have foreseen this; I should have warned you ere now. It was your mother’s fault to marry you to me, and mine to have placed temptation in your way. But how could I tear you from those whose years were suited to yours, to shut you up with an old greybeard! Thus, while I watched over you, my pride in your success made me forgetful of your safety. It is not yet too late, my Pauline—all will be for the best. In time you will learn to love your husband, and to know how devotedly he has loved you since his stupid eyes were opened to your virtues.”

With a smothered cry of joy Pauline threw herself upon his bosom. The poor stricken dove had at last found a shelter.

The next day, while the whole world was lamenting and wondering over the determination of the beautiful, brilliant, and courted Pauline de Vaissiere, to leave the gay metropolis in the midst of its pleasure, she sat once more in her boudoir. A holy calm had settled on her brow, peace had entered her heart; and though a deep blush overspread her features as she heard her husband’s step approaching, she rose to meet him with a grateful look. Putting his arm around her, he drew her closer to him, and pressed a kiss upon her forehead.

“How many days of packing will you require, Pauline?” said he, smiling. “Poor Marie! she has nearly worn her arms out.”

“She will complete her task to-night; and if you like, we can be off in the morning. But have you the carriages ready, mon ami? Are we not before-hand with you?” asked Pauline, in the same cheerful strain.

“We must summon François,” said M. de Vaissiere, “and see if my orders have been executed.”

François had been as prompt as usual; and three days after, we found Pauline gazing out at the windows, mournful and conscience-stricken—she was leaving Paris behind her as fast as four horses and cracking whips could carry her. As they drove on, losing sight of its towers and steeples, a sensation of freedom came over her, and she placed her hand in her husband’s, as if to thank him for her safety. The wound upon her heart was not yet closed; but her firm principle, her love of right, and gratitude for her deliverance, and the indulgence of M. de Vaissiere were fast healing what she did not for a moment allow to rest within her mind.

Every thing delighted her; the ploughed fields, divided by green hedges; the farm-houses scattered far and near; the picturesque appearance of the peasantry and their groupings, as they gathered together to watch the travelers’ suite; and when they stopped at a family estate of M. de Vassiere, her enthusiasm knew no bounds.

Here they remained until the spring was past and summer came, embellishing still more the beautiful woods around the little domain. But they lingered yet in this pleasant place, loving it for the peace it had given them, and the happiness they had learned to feel in being together.

Leaning on her husband’s arm, Pauline wandered amid the bright scenes with a light step, now stopping to admire some variety of foliage, and now pausing by the crystal stream that ran at the foot of the tall trees, murmuring like a hidden sprite, and mirroring the waving boughs, and the blue sky of la belle France. She had forgotten the misery of her bridal-day, or remembered it but to contrast her present quiet enjoyment of life with her then wretchedness. She had forgotten her youth of terror, her husband’s years and his coldness, and now, when she looked upon the silver hair that glittered beside her braids of jet, a feeling of gratitude filled her heart, as she recalled the hour when he might have cast her off with some show of justice, and sent her forth upon the wide world to die.

She had learned to love him, not with the heart-stirring love of youth for youth, but with the deep, holy affection of a prodigal child. Not all the temptations of the gay world could ever make her swerve from her allegiance to him. Like a good and pious daughter did she cling to him, providing for his comfort, and forseeing his every want.

One day he called her to him as she returned from her visit of charity to the surrounding peasantry. She had wept over their troubles and relieved them, and rejoiced with the happy. Her heart was over-flowing, and passing the little church, she entered, and offered up a prayer of thankfulness for her own blessings, and those she was able to confer on others.

Her husband watched her graceful form as she came at his call, and smilingly placed a letter in her hand. It was from her mother, and part of it ran thus:

Pauline’s tears fell fast over this letter; and as she finished reading it, she cast herself upon her husband’s bosom.

“She does not deserve a reply, does she, Pauline?” asked he, with a smile, and pressing her closer to him. “Think you there would be no more marriages de convenance if we were to give the benefit of our experience to the world? Would your mother even be sensible of her error, could she know how your suffering has ended—could she see how happy you make an old man.”

“Let her think that we have been always so,” cried the noble Pauline. “Why disturb her last years with a narrative of what may embitter them? Shall it not be so, my dear, kind husband?”

“It shall, my child,” said he, touched by the generosity of her request. “And you, Pauline, shall write the answer—you, my patient, enduring, and admirable wife! Why is it that I alone know what you have suffered, forced thus to appreciate in silence your noble forbearance.”

But there was another letter to be read—one from Angela. It contained an account of Madame Dumesnil’s failing strength, and her earnest desire to embrace her child once more. Jeannette was long since numbered with the dead; and Angela, whose devotion to her father had made her refuse every offer of marriage, removed with him to the abode of her friend’s mother, passing her life in dividing her cares.

But a short time elapsed and Pauline, with her husband, was sailing once more upon the broad bosom of the Atlantic. It was a long and tedious voyage; but she arrived in time to receive her mother’s blessing, and close her eyes—the reward her filial piety had merited.

Mr. Percy soon followed his aged companion, and Angela returned with Pauline to France. Here she witnessed, with wonder and delight, the happiness that, through Pauline’s virtue, was not incompatible with so great a disparity of age, and rejoiced when a few months after their arrival in Paris, Pauline gave birth to a son and heir. Nothing now was wanting to complete the domestic enjoyment of the circle gathered at the Hotel de Vaissiere; and while the same gay crowds graced its walls, and courted its fair mistress, Pauline never forgot to turn to her husband as the one whose smile was to her the brightest, whose praise the most valued, and whose approbation alone she loved and lived for.

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BY MRS. LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY.

———

———

BY PARK BENJAMIN.

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J. Hayter            A. B. Ross

THE BRIDAL MORNING.

Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine

[SEE ENGRAVING.]

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BY MRS. H. MARION WARD.

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“Home, sweet home!” How many holy and beautiful memories are crowded into those three little words. How does the absent one, when weary with the cold world’s strife, return, like the dove of the deluge, to that bright spot amid the troubled waters of life. “Home, sweet home!” The one household plant that blooms on and on, amid the withering heart-flowers, that brightens up amidst tempests and storms, and gives its sweetest fragrance when all else is gloom and desolation. We never know how deeply its roots are entwined with our heart-strings, till bitter lessons of wasted affection have taught us to appreciate that love which remains the same through years of estrangement. What exile from the spot of his birth but remembers, perhaps with bitterness, the time when falsehood and deceit first broke up the beautiful dreams of his soul, when he learned to see the world in its true colors. How his heart ached for his father’s look of kindness—his mother’s voice of sympathy—a sister’s or brother’s hand to clasp in the warm embrace of kindred affection. Poor, home-sick wanderer! I can feel for your loneliness; for my heart often weeps tears of bitterness over the memories of a far-off home, and in sympathy with a gray-haired father, who, when he calls his little band around the hearth-stone, misses full many a link in the chain of social affection. I can feel for your loneliness, for perhaps you have a father, too, whose eyes have grown dim by long looking into the tomb of love. Perhaps you, too, have a mother, sleeping in some distant grave-yard, beneath the flowers your hands have planted; and as life’s path grows still more rugged before you, you wonder, as I have done, when your time will come to lie down and sleep quietly with her. An incident occurred on board of one of the western steamers, some years since, which strongly impressed me with its truthfulness in proving how wildly the heart clings to home reminiscences when absent from that spot. A party of emigrants had taken passage, amongst whom was a young Swiss girl, accompanied by a small brother. Not even the outré admixture of Swiss, German, and English costume, which composed her dress, could conceal the fact that she was supremely beautiful; and as the emigrants were separated from what is termed the first-class passengers only by a slight railing, I had an opportunity of inspecting her appearance without giving offence by marked observation. Amongst the crowd there happened to be a set of German musicians, who, by amusing the ennuied passengers, reaped quite a harvest of silver for their exertions. I have always heard that the Germans were extremely fond of music, and was surprised that none of the party, not even the beautiful Swiss girl, gave the slightest indication of pleasure, or once removed from the position they had occupied the whole way. Indeed, I was becoming quite indignant, that the soul-stirring Marseilles Hymn of France, the God Save the Queen of England, and last, not least in its impressive melody, the Hail Columbia of our own nation, should have pealed its music out upon the great waters, almost hushing their mighty swell with its enchantment, and yet not waken an echo in the hearts of those homeless wanderers. The musicians paused to rest for a moment, and then suddenly, as if by magic, the glorious Rans des Vache of Switzerland stole over the water, with its touching pathos swelling into grand sublimity, its home-music melting away in love, and then bursting forth in the free, glad strains of revelry, till every breath was hushed as by the presence of visible beauty. Having never before heard this beautiful melody, in my surprise and admiration I had quite forgotten my emigrant friends, when a low sob attracted my attention, and turning round, I saw the Swiss girl, with her head buried in the lap of an old woman, trying to stifle the tears that would force their way or break the heart that held them. I had but a slight knowledge of the Swiss dialect, and “my home, my beautiful home!” was the only words intelligible to me. She wept long and bitterly after the cadence of the song was lost amongst the waves, while the old woman, blessings on her for the act, sought by every endearment within her power to soothe and encourage the home-sick girl. There was little enow of refinement in her rough sympathy, but it was a heart-tribute—and I could almost love her for the unselfishness with which she drew the shrinking form closer to her bosom. I would have given the world to have learned that girl’s previous history. I am sure accident must have thrown her amongst her present associates, as I have seen a lily broken from its stem by a sudden gust of wind, and flung to wither and die amid rude and hardy weeds. In a few hours the party left the boat, and I never saw either her or them again; but, till this day, whenever any incident of a domestic nature wakens old-time dreams, pleasant memories of that beautiful exile, weeping over the music of her lost Eden, and of the kind old woman caressing her, and kissing off the falling tears, creep together, and form a lovely picture of home and heaven-born love.

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BY EDGAR A. POE.

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That punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the extent of its importance! The writer who neglects punctuation, or mis-punctuates, is liable to be misunderstood—this, according to the popular idea, is the sum of the evils arising from heedlessness or ignorance. It does not seem to be known that, even where the sense is perfectly clear, a sentence may be deprived of half its force—its spirit—its point—by improper punctuation. For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

There is no treatise on the topic—and there is no topic on which a treatise is more needed. There seems to exist a vulgar notion that the subject is one of pure conventionality, and cannot be brought within the limits of intelligibly and consistent rule. And yet, if fairly looked in the face, the whole matter is so plain that its rationale may be read as we run. If not anticipated, I shall, hereafter, make an attempt at a magazine paper on “The Philosophy of Point.”

In the meantime let me say a word or two of the dash. Every writer for the press, who has any sense of the accurate, must have been frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by the printer’s now general substitution of a semicolon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into the grossest abuse—although his very error arose from the philosophical and self-dependent spirit which has always distinguished him, and which will even yet lead him, if I am not greatly mistaken in the man, to do something for the literature of the country which the country “will not willingly,” and cannot possibly, “let die.”

Without entering now into the why, let me observe that the printer may always ascertain when the dash of the MS. is properly and when improperly employed, by bearing in mind that this point represents a second thought—an emendation. In using it just above I have exemplified its use. The words “an emendation” are, speaking with reference to grammatical construction, put in apposition with the words “a second thought.” Having written these latter words, I reflected whether it would not be possible to render their meaning more distinct by certain other words. Now, instead of erasing the phrase “a second thought,” which is of some use—which partially conveys the idea intended—which advances me a step toward my full purpose—I suffer it to remain, and merely put a dash between it and the phrase “an emendation.” The dash gives the reader a choice between two, or among three or more expressions, one of which may be more forcible than another, but all of which help out the idea. It stands, in general, for these words—“or, to make my meaning more distinct.” This force it has—and this force no other point can have; since all other points have well-understood uses quite different from this. Therefore, the dash cannot be dispensed with.

It has its phases—its variation of the force described; but the one principle—that of second thought or emendation—will be found at the bottom of all.

In a reply to a letter signed “Outis,” and defending Mr. Longfellow from certain charges supposed to have been made against him by myself, I took occasion to assert that “of the class of willful plagiarists nine out of ten are authors of established reputation who plunder recondite, neglected, or forgotten books.” I came to this conclusion à priori; but experience has confirmed me in it. Here is a plagiarism from Channing; and as it is perpetrated by an anonymous writer in a Monthly Magazine, the theft seems at war with my assertion—until it is seen that the Magazine in question is Campbell’s New Monthly for August, 1828. Channing, at that time, was comparatively unknown; and, besides, the plagiarism appeared in a foreign country, where there was little probability of detection.

Channing, in his essay on Bonaparte, says:

The thief in “The New Monthly,” says:

The article in “The New Monthly” is on “The State of Parties.” The italics are mine.

Apparent plagiarisms frequently arise from an author’s self-repetition. He finds that something he has already published has fallen dead—been over-looked—or that it is peculiarly à propos to another subject now under discussion. He therefore introduces the passage; often without allusion to his having printed it before; and sometimes he introduces it into an anonymous article. An anonymous writer is thus, now and then, unjustly accused of plagiarism—when the sin is merely that of self-repetition.

In the present case, however, there has been a deliberate plagiarism of the silliest as well as meanest species. Trusting to the obscurity of his original, the plagiarist has fallen upon the idea of killing two birds with one stone—of dispensing with all disguise but that of decoration.

Channing says “order”—the writer in the New Monthly says “grade.” The former says that this order is “far from holding,” etc.—the latter says it is “very far from holding.” The one says that military talent is “not conversant,” and so on—the other says “it is never made conversant.” The one speaks of “the highest and richest objects”—the other of “the more delicate and abstruse.” Channing speaks of “thought”—the thief of “mental operations.” Channing mentions “intelligence of the highest order”—the thief will have it of “the highest and rarest.” Channing observes that military talent is often “almost wholly wanting,” etc.—the thief maintains it to be “wholly wanting.” Channing alludes to “large views of human nature”—the thief can be content with nothing less than “enlarged” ones. Finally, the American having been satisfied with a reference to “subjects which have absorbed the most glorious understandings,” the Cockney puts him to shame at once by discoursing about “subjects which have occupied and absorbed the most glorious of human understandings”—as if one could be absorbed, without being occupied, by a subject—as if “of” were here any thing more than two superfluous letters—and as if there were any chance of the reader’s supposing that the understandings in question were the understandings of frogs, or jackasses, or Johnny Bulls.

By the way, in a case of this kind, whenever there is a question as to who is the original and who the plagiarist, the point may be determined, almost invariably, by observing which passage is amplified, or exaggerated, in tone. To disguise his stolen horse, the uneducated thief cuts off the tail; but the educated thief prefers tying on a new tail at the end of the old one, and painting them both sky blue.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

———

BY R. H. STODDARD.

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Painted by E. Landseer      Engraved by J. Sartain

BEAUTY’S BATH.

Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine

[ILLUSTRATING AN ENGRAVING.]

This is a complete edition of one of America’s most popular poets, with the old poems carefully revised, and many new pieces added. It is got up in a similar style with the editions of Longfellow and Bryant, by the same publishers, and is one of the most splendid volumes of the season. The portrait of the author, engraved by Cheney, is the most accurate we have seen. The illustrations, from designs by Leutze, and engraved by Humphrys, Tucker, and Pease, are sixteen in number, and in their character and execution are honorable to American art. They are truly embellishments. Fertile as has been the house of Carey & Hart in beautiful books, they have published nothing more elegant and tasteful than the present edition of Willis.

We have written, in various critiques, at such length on the merits and characteristics of Willis, that it would be but repetition to dilate upon his genius now. In looking over the present volume, we cannot see that the sparkle and fire of his poetry becomes dim, even as read by eyes which have often performed that pleasant task before. The old witchery still abides in them, and the old sweetness, raciness, melody and power. That versatile mind, gliding with such graceful ease over the whole ground of “occasional” pieces, serious and mirthful, impassioned and tender, sacred and satirical, looks out upon us with the same freshness from his present “pictured” page, as when we hunted it, in the old time, through newspapers, magazines, and incomplete collections. We cordially wish the author the same success in his present rich dress, which he has always met in whatever style of typography he has invaded the public heart. When the stereotype plates of the present edition are worn out, it does not require the gift of prophecy to predict that the poet’s reputation will be as unworn and as bright as ever.

This little volume, viewed in respect to the prejudices it so clearly exposes and opposes, is quite an important publication, and we trust it will find readers among those who need it most. That clumsy habit of the public mind, by which the perversions are confounded with the use of a thing, finds in Mr. Sawyer an acute analyst as well as sensible opponent. He has done his work with much learning, ability and taste, and has contrived to make his exposure of popular bigotries as interesting as it is useful.

Here is a work by a brave and intelligent soldier, relating to the battles of General Taylor in Mexico, of which he was an eye-witness. It has the freshness which might be expected from a writer who mingled in the scenes he describes; and the plates of the different battle-grounds enable the reader intelligently to follow the descriptions of the author. Spite of the numerous books relating to the subject already before the public, Captain Henry’s volume will be found to contain much not generally known, and to describe what is generally known better than most of his precursors in the task.

The above editions of the somewhat too celebrated George Sand are got up, by our enterprising friend the publisher, in a style superior to that generally used on this species of literature. The translation by F. G. Shaw, Esq. has been generally, and we think justly, commended. The works themselves, and their tendencies and results, have been made the subject of various opinions both here and abroad. We are not among those who are prepared to enter the lists as their champion. The translator himself remarks in relation to Consuelo: “That it has not found fit translation before, was doubtless owing to prevailing impressions of something erratic and bizarre in the author’s way of living, and to a certain undeniable tone of wild, defying freedom in her earlier writings.” The censure of the moral portion of the community is thus softly and mercifully expressed: We will not at present add to it.

A well printed and cheap volume.

This work contains a spirited and vivid sketch of the Mexican war as prosecuted under Taylor. It is full of incident and interest, is written with spirit, and illustrated by a number of engravings.

DESCRIPTION OF THE FASHION PLATE.

Toilette de Ville.—Dress of gray satin, with a plain skirt; corsage plain, with a rounded point; sleeves above of violet-colored velvet, closed on the top, and trimmed with very rich lace; small pelerine to the waists, and terminated at the seam of the shoulder, trimmed with lace. Hat of yellow satin, long at the cheeks, and rounded, ornamented with a bouquet of white flowers resting on the side, and a puff of tulle on the inside.

Riche Toilette d’Interieur.—Dress of blue cashmere, ornamented with a row of silver buttons down the front of the skirts; corsage plain, with buttons, and terminating in two small points; sleeves rather short, and under ones of three rows of lace: neck-dress of lace. Cap also of lace, resting flat upon the front of the head, and forming folds behind, trimmed with bows of ribbon, of rose-colored taffeta, below the lace to the depth of the strings.

Erratum.—In the article on Stoke Church and Church-yard, page 77, 12th line from bottom of 2d column, “1779” should read 1799.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Archaic spellings and hyphenation have been retained. Punctuation has been corrected without note. Other errors have been corrected as noted below. For illustrations, some caption text may be missing or incomplete due to condition of the originals available for preparation of the ebook.

[The end of Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 2 February 1848 edited by George R. Graham]