of the ruin; and, to give those within fair notice of his vicinity, began whistling and calling loudly to his dog. Before he gained the porch a man rushed out, and, slouching his hat over his eyes, hurried down the glen: at the same moment a little Scotch terrier trotted up to Prince, barking at him furiously. But while this modicum of dog's-flesh kept advancing and retreating in quick succession, and wagging both tongue and tail with amazing velocity, his highness stood immoveably still, and allowed himself to be barked at with great dignity and endurance, taking no other notice of the attack than by placing his black, cold, stately nose amicably close to the aggressor's ear, and ever and anon giving one or two slow wags of his tail.

"Wasp, Wasp, Wasp, come here, sir," said Madge Brindal, now emerging from the ruins and leading Mary Lee's child. Cheveley started, evidently much struck by the picturesque dress and great beauty of the girl, whose brilliant complexion was rendered even richer at the moment by the fresh air and bright sunlight that, together, played upon her cheek.

"Such a fine gentleman as you should have a fine fortune: let me tell it you," said Madge, coming laughingly up to him. "Blessings on your handsome face, may all your years be summers; but I'm sure, before I look at your hand, that your fate is spun with velvet and silk; do let me unravel it for you."

"Good heavens!" cried Cheveley, for the first time looking at the child, and perfectly staggered with its likeness to Lord de Clifford, "whose child is that?"

"Poor child," said Madge, her eyes flashing as she spoke, "he has Sin for his father, and Sorrow for his mother; but his father is a great man, the popular member at Triverton."

"Lord-"

"De Clifford !" screamed Madge, as though she took delight in the impotent revenge of making the rocks echo with his name.

"Then it must have been since his marriage,” said Cheveley, thinking aloud.

"You know him, then?" said Madge, looking eagerly in his face.

Cheveley was buried in a train of thought, and made

no answer.

"I hear," continued Madge, "that the wretch has a wife that is too good for him."

"Too good for him! too good for any man!” cried Cheveley, biting his lip, and completely thrown off his guard by the violence of his own feelings. This was enough for the quick penetration of Madge; at one moment she discovered the truth, for nothing seemed more natural in her mind than that a man who never thought of his own wife, like Lord de Clifford, might find other men to do so for him; and having decided this point to her satisfaction, she determined upon availing herself of it, and acting accordingly.

"Well, well," said she, "it is a waste of time to talk of such as him; so do, kind sir, let me tell you your fortune. I'll warrant, if it ever had any, that the gall is by this time taken out of it."

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By-and-by," replied Cheveley, smiling; "but first tell me the history of this child."

"That will I," said Madge; "I wish I could tell it to the whole world; walk down the glen with me, and you shall hear it."

He followed her till they reached the Fairy's Bath, at the foot of the little winding path, when Madge, having pointed to the park trees of Blichingly, that were visible in the distance, commenced poor Mary Lee's story, and told it to him from beginning to end, acting so vividly the scene on the night that Richard Brindal had found her a senseless idiot in that very place where they were then standing, that Cheveley shuddered.

"Monster!" exclaimed he, drawing his hand across his eyes, as if to shut out some hideous phantom. “I wish I could see those letters ?"

"And so you could," replied Madge, "if you would come as far as poor Lee's cottage; for I know where Mary keeps them, and I could get them and show them to you without her knowing a word about it; not that she now minds any one seeing them; no, no, he has insulted and trampled on her too much to have left any other feelings in her but hatred and revenge! but it's too far for a grand gentleman like you to walk, and all across the fields too."

"How far is it?" asked Cheveley.

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Nearly three miles."

"Not a bit too far, especially if they are so poor; I may be able to do something for them."

"God bless you for that, sir; but do let me tell you your fortune, for I should like to tell you all the good that I know is in store for you."

"Well, then," said Cheveley, smiling, as he put a sovereign into her hand, "be quick, and give me as much good fortune as this will purchase."

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Madge took his hand, and, examining it minutely, shook her head. "This is no common hand," said she: you have plenty to be happy with, but still you are not so; for there are wings to your heart, and it's not with you; no, nor never will be till all this has passed away. There is blood, and death, and fear, and but little hope; but that little is shrouded in a widow's hood."

Madge perceived a slight tremulousness in the hand she held, and she added, "But this year binds your fate; hush!" continued she, pointing upward, and inclining her ear towards her hand, as though listening to some mysterious sounds, for Cheveley could hear none, “hush! ay, the last sound has died away; all now is over; even when there are not tears there must be time for the dead; and however slowly it may lag," said Madge, suiting the action to the word by drawing her hand through the air, and then suddenly stopping, "it must stop at last, and then your sun will rise, and a brighter one never yet rose than it will be."

The oracular voice and Pythian air that Madge knew so well how to assume, had, in spite of himself, an effect upon Cheveley for a few minutes beyond the power of reason and common sense to ridicule him out of. The skilfully vague way she had alluded to his fate, leaving fancy to interpret, and chance to confirm her predictions, either way, glided from his imagination into his heart; he knew it was a folly, but it was one that for worlds he would not have been disabused of; for love always dislikes the head wisdom that would reduce the heart to sanity, placing the strait waistcoat of reason upon every feeling. There is not, perhaps, a more affecting proof of this extant, than an anecdote Kotzebue mentions, in his "Travels to Paris," of a girl who was in the habit of being accompanied on the harpsichord by her lover on the harp. The lover died, and his harp remained in her room. After the first paroxysm of despair, she sank into the deepest melancholy, and much time elapsed before she could bear the sound of music; but one day she mechanically struck a few

chords on the harpsichord, when, lo! her lover's harp in perfect unison, resounded to the echo. The girl was at first seized with an awful shuddering, but soon felt a kind of soothing melancholy; she thought the spirit of her lover was hovering near her, and sweeping the strings of the instrument. The harpsichord from this time constituted her only pleasure, as it afforded to her imagination the joyful certainty that her lover was ever near her till one day, one of those awfully wise men, who try to know, and insist upon clearing up and explaining everything, came into the room during one of these mysterious duets; the poor girl begged of him to be still, as, at that moment, the dear harp was playing to her in its softest tones. Being informed of the happy illusion that overcame her reason, he laughed, and, with a great display of learning and absence of feeling, proved to her, by experimental physics, that all this was perfectly natural. From that moment the poor girl drooped, sank into a profound melancholy, and soon after died.*

What is life but a series of illusions? for the most part miserable! then are they not the worst of murderers who would destroy the few happy ones that diversify it?

They walked on in silence nearly the whole of the way; while the two dogs, who had by this time entered into an honest friendship with each other, amused themselves by running races and beating the hedges.

"And so these Lees are very poor ?" said Cheveley. "Very poor now, indeed, sir; few people had a better business than John Lee before poor Mary's troubles; but since, he does not seem to exert himself to please people as he used; and the old lady up at the Park, God forgive her for that and all her other wickedness, since her son's villany, has tried to prevent people dealing with him; and as they are chiefly her tenants round Blichingly, they are obliged to do whatever she pleases, so that he has little now to do beyond the workhouse coffins; but Mary being better, poor thing, takes in plain work again, which helps them a little. Lee could have got a very good job to repair the outhouses at Campfield last week, but he had no money to buy timber, and so was obliged to give it up."

*This anecdote has furnished the subject of a Tale by the heroic poet Korner, called "The Harp."

This narration brought them in sight of Lee's cottage; the garden was wild and desolate as usual, but opposite the door was a white birch, which Coleridge has immortalized as the

"Most beautiful

Of forest trees, the Lady of the Woods."

Its leafless and shadowy branches were now waving to and fro as the wind sighed through them, and although it was a bright sunny day in the woods and fields, there was a gray gloom round the nook in which Lee's cottage was situated that harmonized with the neglected look of the once-blooming garden. Wasp having done the honours to Prince by pushing open the gate with his paws, and flinging a look of invitation to him over his shoulder to follow, Madge in her turn preceded Cheveley, and pioneered away the long entangled weeds on each side of the gravel-walk that would have intercepted his passage.

"Stop," said he, as Madge laid her hand on the latch of the door; "my sudden appearance, without any ostensible reason, might distress the poor girl; so you can say I have come to bespeak some work from her father, which I intend to do; but, before I do so, I should like to see those letters you mention; you can make some excuse to call me into the garden, and show them to me there."

Madge nodded assent as she raised the latch and put down the child, who ran to its mother.

"How he do grow, to be sure," said Mrs. Stokes, who was interrupted by the child's arrival in an eloquent lament over the depredations her poultry-yard had lately experienced; all of which she unhesitatingly attributed to Richard Brindal's revenge and her husband's inertness. Mary was sitting at work on one side of the fireplace, while her father, who had his ironrimmed spectacles on his forehead, paused from his occupation (which was that of fixing up a bracket at the other side of the chimneypiece) to listen to Mrs. Stokes's grievances.

"As I tell 'em," resumed Mrs. Stokes, speaking with even more energy and vitality than usual, "all these here worries'll be the death of me, and who'll manage the concern when I'm gone? and who'll manage John Stokes, I should like to know? oh! it won't bear a thought!"