GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXI. July, 1842 No. 1.

Contents

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

GRAHAM’S

LADY’S AND GENTLEMAN’S

MAGAZINE,

EMBELLISHED WITH

MEZZOTINT AND STEEL ENGRAVINGS, MUSIC, ETC.

WILLIAM C. BRYANT, J. FENIMORE COOPER, RICHARD H. DANA, HENRY W. LONGFELLOW, CHARLES F. HOFFMAN, THEODORE S. FAY, J. H. MANCUR,

MRS. EMMA C. EMBURY, MRS. SEBA SMITH, MRS. “MARY CLAVERS,” MRS. E. F. ELLET, MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS, MRS. FRANCES S. OSGOOD, ETC.,

PRINCIPAL CONTRIBUTORS.

GEORGE R. GRAHAM AND RUFUS W. GRISWOLD, EDITORS.

VOLUME XXI.

PHILADELPHIA:

GEORGE R. GRAHAM, NO. 98 CHESNUT STREET.

...........

1842.

INDEX

TO THE

TWENTY-FIRST VOLUME.

FROM JUNE TO DECEMBER, 1842, INCLUSIVE.

E. T. Parris. E. G. Dunnel.

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXI. PHILADELPHIA: JULY, 1842. No. 1.

THE POLISH MOTHER.

It was a gorgeous bridal. The old hall of the palace was lit up with a thousand lights, and crowded with all the wealth, beauty and rank of Poland. The apartment blazed with the jewels of its occupants. Princes with their proud dames, high officers of state, nobles whose domains vied in extent with kingdoms, and lordly beauties beneath whose gaze all bent in adoration, had gathered at that magnificent festival to do honor to the bridal of the fair daughter of their host. And loveliest among the lovely was the bride. Tall and majestic in every movement, with a queenly brow, and a face such as might have been that of the mother of the gods, she moved through the splendid apartment the theme of every admiring tongue. Nor less remarkable was her husband. Warsaw beheld no noble tread her palaces more lordly in his bearing than the Count Restchifky. The fire of a hundred warrior ancestors burned in his eye. The fame of his high lineage, of his extended possessions, of his feats in arms, followed his footsteps wherever he went. In manly beauty the court of Poland had no rival to the count, in majestic loveliness the realm furnished no equal to his bride. And now, as they stood together in that proud old hall, surrounded by all that was noble and beautiful in the land, the peerless beauty of the countess and the princely bearing of her husband shone pre-eminent.

Never had Warsaw seen such a festival. All that the most boundless wealth and all that a taste the most fastidious could do to add to the splendor of the occasion had been done, and the guests, one and all, bore testimony to the success of the princely entertainer. The air was laden with incense, flowers bloomed around, unseen music filled the hall with harmony, and statues and carvings of rare device met the eye at every turn. If Aladdin had been there he would not have asked that his enchanted palace should excel in magnificence the one before him. No visionary, in his wildest dream, could imagine aught more beautiful. And through this unrivalled ball the count and his bride moved, conscious that all this splendor was evoked for their honor, feeling that not a heart in all the vast assembly but envied their exalted lot. At every step congratulations met them until they turned away sick with adulation. What wonder that the rose grew still deeper on the cheek of the bride, that her eyes flashed with brighter brilliancy, or that her step became more queenly? Could aught mortal wholly resist the intoxication of that hour?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Years had elapsed. That fair young bride had become a mother; but time had passed over her without destroying one lineament of her majestic beauty. But the scene had changed from that through which she moved on her bridal night. There were no longer around her wealth and splendor and beauty, the flattery of the proud, the envy of the fair. She sat alone—alone with her two children, one a lovely girl of sixteen, and the other a smiling boy whose birth three years before had thrilled her husband’s heart with ecstasy, filled a province with rejoicings. But now that husband was away from her side, that province lay smoking around her. Her own proud home, where since her marriage she had spent the happiest hours of her life, had been sacked and given to the flames, and she now sat leaning against a shattered parapet, with her face buried in her hands, and the bitter tear of a mother’s anguish rolling down her cheeks. At her feet, leaning on her for succor, and clasping her hand, sat her daughter; while her boy, too young as yet to be conscious of the misery around him, smiled as he played with the jewelled cross depending from his mother’s neck. A broken sword, a dismounted cannon, the shattered staff of a lance, at the feet of the group, betokened that the vassals of the count had not yielded up her house to rapine without a deadly struggle; and indeed, of the hundreds of hearts which beat there, but the day before, only those of the mother and her two children had escaped captivity or death. Part of the palace was yet in flames, while, on the plain beyond, a village threw its lurid conflagration across the sky. Desolation and despair sat enthroned around. Who that had seen that mother on her bridal night, could have foretold that her after life would reveal a scene like this?

The Polish war for independence had broken out. Among the foremost of the patriotic band which perilled all for their country, was the Count Restchifky. His sword had been unsheathed at the outbreak of the conflict, his fortune had been poured the first into the coffers of the state. From his own estates he had raised and equipped as gallant a band as ever followed lord to the tented field. And for a short space the war seemed to prosper. But then came the reverse. From every quarter the haughty Catharine poured her countless legions, headed by the fierce Suwarrow, into Poland, and smoking fields and slaughtered armies soon told that the day of hope for that ill-fated land was over. Yet a few noble spirits, among whom the count was foremost, still held out for their country, fighting every foot of ground, and though retreating before the overwhelming forces of the foe, compelling him to purchase every rood of land he gained by the lives of hundreds of his venal followers. It was at this period, and while the count was far from his home, that his palace had been attacked, and given to the flames. Afar from succor, unconscious whether or not her husband yet lived, and trembling for the lives of her offspring amid the desolation which surrounded them, what wonder that even the proud heart of the countess gave way, and that she wept in utter agony over her ruined country and her dismantled home!

“Oh! mother,” said the daughter, “if we only knew where father was, or if he yet lived, we might still be happy. Wealth is nothing to us, for will we not still love each other? Dry your tears, dear mother, for something tells me that father lives and will yet rejoin us.”

At these words of comfort, more soothing because coming from a quarter so unexpected, the mother looked up, and, drawing her daughter to her bosom, kissed her, saying,

“You are right, my child. We will hope for the best. And if your father has indeed fallen, and we are alone in the world, I will remember that I have you to comfort me, and strive—to—be happy,” and, in despite of her effort to be calm, the tears gushed into her eyes at the bare thought of the possible loss of her husband.

“But see, mother,” suddenly exclaimed the daughter, “see the cloud of dust across the plain—can it betoken the return of the foe?” and she drew close to her mother’s side.

The mother gazed with eager eyes across the plain, and her cheek paled as she thought she distinguished the banner of Russia borne in the advance.

“It is, it is as I feared,” said the daughter, “they come to carry us into captivity. Oh! let us hide from their sight—there are secret recesses in the ruins yet where we might defy scrutiny.”

“No,” said the mother, all the spirit of her race rising in her at this crisis, “no, my daughter, it would not become us, like base-born churls, thus to fly from a foe. The wife and children of Count Restchifky will meet his enemies on his own hearth-stone, all dismantled though it be.”

With these words she clasped her babe closer to her bosom, and sat down again behind the parapet to await, as the daughter of a hundred princes should await, the approach of her murderers; and although perhaps her cheek was a hue paler, the lofty glance of her eye quailed not. Her daughter sank to her feet and buried her face in her mother’s robe. But after a few minutes she regained courage, and looked timidly out across the plain. At the first glance she started and said eagerly,

“But see, mother, can they really be enemies? They wave their banners as if to us—they increase their speed—surely, surely that gallant horseman in the advance is my own dear father.”

A moment the mother gazed eagerly on the approaching horseman, but a moment only. The eye of the wife saw that her husband was indeed there, and, with a glad cry, she clasped her children in her arms and burst into a flood of joyful tears. She was still weeping when the count, dismounting from his charger, rushed forward and clasped her in his arms.

“Thank God!” he ejaculated, “you at least are left to me. I had feared to find you no more. May the lightning of heaven blast the cravens who could thus desolate the home of a woman.”

“My husband, oh! my husband!” was all that the wife could say.

“Father, dear father, you are safe—oh! we shall yet be happy,” said the daughter as she clung to her restored parent.

The father kissed and re-kissed them all, and for once his stern nature was moved to tears, but they were tears of joy.

His story was soon told. Finding that all hope of saving his country was over, and eager to learn the fate of those he had left at home, he had cut his way through the enemy with a few gallant followers. As he drew near the vicinity of his palace, he had heard strange rumors of the sacking of his home, and on every side his own eyes beheld the ravages of the foe. Torn with a thousand fears respecting the fate of those he loved better than life, he had pressed madly on, and when the blackened and smoking walls of his palace had risen before him in the distance he had almost given way to despair. But, at length, his eager eye caught sight of a group amid the ruins, and his heart told him that those he loved remained yet to cheer his ruined fortunes.

No pen can do justice to the feelings of gratitude which throbbed in the bosom of that father as he pressed his wife and children successively to his heart. His plans were soon laid. He had, by remittances to England on the outbreak of the war, provided his family against want, and thither they now bent their steps. Over his ruined country he shed many a tear, but, at such times, the smiles of his wife and children were ever ready to cheer his despondency; and as he gazed on his lovely family he felt that there was much yet in this world to bid him be happy.

“THOU HAST LOVED.”

———

BY MRS. SEBA SMITH.

———

Dearest, in thine eye’s deep light

Is a look to tears allied⁠—

Sorrow struggling with delight,

Each the other seeks to hide;

Thou, the freighted ark of life

Lonely floating on the sea,

With thy being’s treasure rife⁠—

Thou hast wearied thus to be.

Thou hast sent thy dove from thee⁠—

Forth hast launched thy dove of peace,

And the branch, though green it be,

Can it bid thy doubtings cease?

Though it speak of hope the while,

Verdant spots and sunny bowers,

Can it bring thee back the smile

That beguiled thy vacant hours?

Take thy dove and fold its wing⁠—

Fold its ruffled wing to rest;

Deluge airs around it ring:

Let it nestle on thy breast.

Dearest, all thy care is vain⁠—

Mark its trembling, weary wings;

But it comes to thee again,

And an olive branch it brings.

Take it, bind it unto thee,

Though the leaves are dim with tears;

Such thy woman lot must be⁠—

Love and sorrow, hopes and fears.

Bind the branch of promise ever

To thy heart, with fear oppressed,

Let the leaves of hope, oh! never,

Withered, leave their place of rest.

VIOLA.

———

BY JAMES ALDRICH.

———

This simple chain of sunny hair,

Thus braided by thy gentle hand,

Anear my heart I ever wear,

Since thou art gone to shadow-land.

Whene’er upon the little gift

Of thy sweet love my eye is cast,

Will welcome memory come and lift

The curtains of the silent Past!

Ah! my fond heart, as well it may,

Feels then, in all its depth anew,

That which, when thou wait called away,

Ennobled and immortal grew!

Lost one! to thee I’ll constant prove,

Long as I walk this mortal strand,

So may I claim thy perfect love

When we shall meet in shadow-land.

PAINTED BY LUCY ADAMS. ENGRAVED BY H. S. SADD.

MORNING PRAYER.

ILLUSTRATION OF A PICTURE.

He is not here!

We meet around the altar yet once more,

Where we our prayers have blent so oft before,

And drop a tear

Upon the holy book from which he read

Who sleeps, at length, in peace, among the silent dead.

Yet from on high

He looketh on us—widow, daughter, son⁠—

Pointing the course by which he glory won.

He still is nigh,

On angel’s wings, to comfort us and guide,⁠—

Unseen, but not unfelt, forever by our side.

Father in heaven!

Who hast called home the leader of our band,

And the bright glories of the better land

Unto him given,

O, be with us, and keep us in the way

That leads, through this dark night, to an unending day!

Strengthen our hearts

To bear, with fortitude, the ills of time;

Preserve them ever from the winter’s rime,

So let our parts

Be acted, that again the prayer and song

We may together blend, and through all time prolong!

THE FANCY-FAIR.

———

BY MRS. A. M. F. ANNAN.

———

“With her personage, her tall personage,

Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him.”

Shakspeare.

“Good morning, Saybrooke,” said a gentleman named Creswell, meeting a friend; “I have just ascertained to whom Collins is married—a lady of your city—Laura Sands.”

“Amazing!” exclaimed Saybrooke, striking down his cane with such energy that the other started; “why, she is six feet high!”

“Not quite,” returned Creswell, laughing; “and, though somewhat large, she is one of the most queenly looking women—”

“Pshaw! Victoria has put that word out of fashion, or at least changed its signification.”

“I beg pardon—I had forgotten your horror of large women, or, rather, I did not regard it, supposing it was your affectation—everybody has at least one.”

“Affectation! take care, or I’ll raise my stick at you!”

“Well, it is unaccountable that a man of your inches should have such notions. Now, for a little fellow, like myself, it would be bad taste to be following women who might look as if they could flog him, but with your six feet two, and abundant proportions, the case is different. On the contrary, I can’t imagine anything more comical than a little wife hanging on your arm; she would look like a reticule—not straining a pun.”

“In saying I detest large women, I make no committal by preferring very small ones; but, seriously, I would no more expect to find a woman’s soul in all its sweetness, delicacy and purity hidden in a coarse, capacious body, than I could think of loving a woman for the recommendation—‘Sexu fæmina, ingenio vir.’ ”

“There it is with you men of fortune! You become so finical from having all sorts of attractions paraded before you, that you stand still waiting for perfection, till at last, in despair, you tie up your eyes, and, like a child at blind man’s buff, spring forward and secure the first against whom you stumble. Now, we poor, hard-working dogs—but I’ll get out of heart if I talk about my own grievances. I have a lady selected for you, beautiful, accomplished, with a thousand excellencies, and of station in society and all that, just to suit, but this last freak has chilled my good intentions. So good bye, till I get into a better humor!”

In the evening the two gentlemen met again, as Saybrooke was coming out of an exchange office, in the act of securing his pocket book.

“Have you been filling or emptying that article, which?” asked Creswell.

“The more agreeable alternative,” replied his friend.

“Then you are the very fellow I wished to see. I have an appointment for you to-night—to take you to a ladies’ fair.”

“The mischief! when you know that fancy-fairs are my aversion, and not from caprice but from real principle. I don’t know anything more disgusting than to see a room full of Misses, taking advantage of some either really or nominally worthy purpose, to exhibit themselves to the public, and to gratify a petty and an indelicate vanity, by flirting over their pincushions and doll-babies with any fellow who can afford an admittance shilling for the honor.”

“Come, come, that’s really too severe, but just now I have not time to take the other side of the question. This, however, is no ordinary occasion. It is an impromptu affair, undertaken by a number of charming, whole-hearted girls, to raise a fund in aid of the sufferers by a recent public disaster, and more taste, enthusiasm, and liberality, I have never seen exhibited. If you wish to see the élite of our beauty and fashion, under the most favorable circumstances, you had better avail yourself of my invitation.”

“If that is the case, I have no scruples. I intended to appropriate a part of this very supply to a charity so unquestionable, and it may as well pass through the medium you have selected as any other. So I’m at your service.”

At the appointed time they reached the —— Saloon, in which the fair was held, and Creswell, who from previous visits was posted as to all concerning it, led his friend, for a cursory inspection, around the room. Its arrangements were novel and tasteful, its decorations of the most rich and appropriate character, and the fair projectors were fulfilling their duties with a dignity, grace, and decorum that surprised as well as gratified the fastidious stranger.

“Now, if you are satisfied,” said Creswell, “I’ll give myself the trouble to advise you in the disposal of that spare cash of yours—come to this table,” and bowing to its fair attendant, he took up a large and magnificently bound quarto volume, and turned over its pages; “I have heard you express a fondness, Saybrooke,” he continued, “for what you call the only ladies’ science—Botany; did you ever see any thing to equal this?” It was a collection of dried flowers, of such as best preserve their color, pressed with great niceness and skill, and pasted on the smooth, white pages so carefully, some singly and some in groups, that it required close examination to distinguish them from delicate water-color drawings. Beneath them were written, in an exquisite hand, clear, full, and accurate technical descriptions, and on intermediate pages quotations appropriate to their symbolical characters, or fanciful and elegant passages, evidently original.

“This must have been the work of a lady, judging from its ingenuity and beauty,” said Saybrooke.

“It was done by Miss Martha Grainger, was it not?” asked Creswell, turning to the title page, which was a graceful vignette, executed, even to the lettering, in leaves and flowers, but it contained no name.

“Of course,” returned the pretty vender; “no other of us could have had the taste, patience, and knowledge for such a work, to say nothing of the talent the literary illustrations display. I really think it was a piece of heroism in her to give up a possession so beautiful, and one that must have cost her a world of labor and care.”

“If it is not already sold, I shall be happy to become its purchaser,” said Saybrooke; and paying for his acquisition with much satisfaction, they walked on. The next thing that struck their notice was a large vase encrusted with shells, and filled with fragrant and splendid flowers. It was white, and transparent as alabaster, and of an antique form, as rare as beautiful. Saybrooke examined it carefully. “How superior,” said he, “to the unshapely, crockery-looking ware commonly seen as shell-work—nothing could be more perfectly elegant and classical than it is.”

“Is it of your workmanship, Miss Ellen?” asked Creswell.

“I am sorry to say, very far from it. It is a donation from Martha Grainger; she had just finished it for herself, but, with her usual generous benevolence, gave it up in hope that it might be turned to the benefit of the unfortunate. The flowers, which you seem to admire so much, Mr. Creswell, are also of her culture. Her windows, you know, were the rivals of the green-houses, but she robbed them all to fill it. Suppose you take it for your office? There is no one who will value it more.”

“Ah, if I could afford to have all I value! but I would not desecrate anything so pure and sweet, by stowing it away among the rough book-cases, and dust, and cobwebs of a poor lawyer’s office. Now, my friend here could give it a place not unworthy. If it were placed within your curtains, Saybrooke, I’d engage that you would have more bright eyes peeping through your windows than you ever had before.”

“The temptation is too strong to be resisted,” answered Saybrooke, smiling, and he placed his card in a handle of the vase, as its purchaser. “I am glad to find that the botanical lady has a real love of flowers,” he continued, as he walked away with a China rose, which he had selected, in his hand; “it is not always the case; a proficiency in the science argues a clear and discriminating mind; the other seems to belong to a naturally refined taste.”

“Pray, Mr. Creswell, can’t you find us a purchaser for this?” asked a lady, pointing to a glass case, which contained a set of elaborately carved ivory chess-men.

“An exquisite set,” said Saybrooke, “they look like fairy work.”

“I think this is not the first time I have seen them, madam; can you remind me where they came from?” said Creswell.

“They were added to our stock by Miss Grainger, an effort of self-denial that I fear I never could have attained. They were sent to her as a present by an uncle in India, but she is so conscientious that she offered them for our undertaking, saying that she could not be satisfied to keep them for mere amusement, when a set for ten dollars would answer as well. Of course we cannot expect to get their real value, as, very properly, there are few persons who would offer a couple of hundred dollars for a thing of the kind, but we are in hopes that some one willing to aid the cause will take them at a price which, at least, will not be unworthy of the generosity of the donor.”

“As it is not very likely, from present appearances,” said Saybrooke, “that the artists of the Celestial Empire will have the courage and leisure to execute toys so singularly elaborate and ingenious for some time to come, I may as well avail myself of the opportunity, and take possession of these. Will this be sufficient for them, madam?”

“Thank you, sir, for your liberality,—it is more than we expected;” said the lady, looking after the stranger with much curiosity.

“That Miss Grainger must be a remarkable person to be possessed of so much talent and industry, and so much open-handed generosity. But what have you there?” Creswell was looking at a pair of small paintings which ornamented one of the stalls, and Saybrooke continued, after joining him, “these are really beautiful little things, and from their apparent reference to the late calamity, they must have been furnished expressly for this occasion. They are evidently by the same hand, yet it must have been difficult for one person to do them in so short a time. There is much feeling, as well as originality, in the designs, and not less spirit than grace in their execution. May I ask, Miss, from whom these were obtained?”

“They are from the pencil of a lady, sir,—the all-accomplished Miss Grainger.”

“Miss Grainger again!” said Saybrooke smiling; “they are marked for sale, I believe?”

“They are, sir, though we would prefer letting them remain here till the sale is over.”

“Certainly; but you will let me secure them in time?” and having completed the purchase, he followed Creswell; “there now,” said he, “I think I have done my part, so I shall tie up my purse-strings; but pray who is this Miss Grainger?”

“What do you imagine her to be?”

“An active, bustling, fussy old maid, such a person who is always to be found in the like enterprises; but in addition she must have an enlarged mind, which, having freed her from the selfishness peculiar to her relative position, still furnishes her with resources to devote to general benevolence.”

“You never were more mistaken in your life,—but what do you think of that oriental kiosk which the ladies have fitted up as the post-office?”

“I was just going to remark that it is particularly tasteful and beautiful.”

“The plan is another of the labors of Miss Grainger,—but we must ask for letters to finish our business.”

“Certainly, but where is your fair virtuoso? you must point her out to me.”

“Very well, come along, and I’ll introduce you, but of one thing I must apprise you beforehand,—with all her admirable qualities she is, unfortunately, quite—a large woman—the largest, I should think, in the room.”

“That is unfortunate,” said Saybrooke, looking disturbed; “but as I wish merely to have my curiosity gratified, and to pay a tribute of respect to an intellectual and a useful woman, I shall put up with that.”

Creswell paused to speak with an acquaintance, and Saybrooke walked forward. Suddenly a lady swept by, almost jostling him, and of a size that over-shadowed all around her. She was beflounced and befurred, had a tall feather waving above her hat, a decided shade on her upper lip, and a step like a grenadier.

“See here, Creswell, you needn’t mind taking me to see Miss Grainger,—I don’t want to be introduced to her,” said Saybrooke.

“You have changed your mind very suddenly,” returned Creswell.

“You told me she was the largest woman in the room, and by accident I have just met her. I recognized her, of course, and my curiosity is amply gratified.”

Creswell followed his eye, and burst into an irrepressible fit of laughter. “Oh, very well,” said he, “if you are satisfied, so am I. But here is the post-office. Anything here, ladies, for Stanley Saybrooke, Esq.?—just excuse me, while you are waiting for your letter.”

The postmistress was one of the youngest of the association, and whilst she was searching, with much archness and significancy, among the letters, the eyes of Saybrooke fell upon a lady farther back in the alcove, from whom a single look acted like magic on him. The features were of a form and symmetry the most faultlessly classical, and were radiant with an expression of sweetness and intelligence. Her eyes were large and of a soft blue, her complexion was of the purest white and red, and her hair, of a rich brown, fell in a single large curl, smooth and glossy, down either side of her face. She wore a small black velvet bonnet, which contrasted strikingly with the pearliness of her skin, and which, excepting in a little bordering of blond around the face, was entirely without ornament. Vexatiously, as our hero thought it, there was nothing of her figure to be seen; she sat wrapped in a large shawl, on an ottoman behind a table, and appeared quite unconscious of attracting attention, or, at least, indifferent to it.

“Here is a letter, sir;” said the officious little postmistress, with a mischievous smile, but Saybrooke stood unheeding; “there is nothing else, sir;” she added, and recollecting himself, he walked reluctantly away. The letter was a little poetical bagatelle, to which he paid no attention, and reconnoitering the kiosk, he placed himself where, by keeping among the folds of a curtain, he might retain a view of the face which had so much fascinated him. Though, at his distance, he could not overhear a word, he watched her quiet, yet neither cold nor languid manner, to the many who approached and addressed her. “What a lovely—lovely creature she is!” thought he, “if I had not so long dropped my school-boy notions of love at first-sight, I really would believe myself captivated!—how calm she is!—how unembarrassed and dignified, and yet how gracious!”

Creswell returned, but Saybrooke, ashamed to ask a single question lest it might betray him, pleaded fatigue, and declined walking farther, and his friend, who had been watching him, to his secret amusement, left him to the indulgence of his observations.

By this time the story of his liberality, exaggerated, of course, had made its way over the room, and many were the efforts of the fair promenaders to catch the attention of a stranger so fashionable in appearance, so handsome, and reportedly so rich; but if he noticed the attractions of any, it was only to remark how inferior they were to those he was so intently contemplating. At length, to his extreme delight, he observed that she had picked up the rose which he had dropped on the table in his first bewilderment. “What a dolt I have been,” said he to himself; “after coming here to lay out money in charity, to take and retain an equivalent for it!” and to ease his conscience, he decided to get rid of the vase. So calling a servant who was attending on the tables, he directed him where to find it, and to present it to the designated lady in the post-office, with the compliments of a gentleman. He watched as the commission was executed. There was no flutter in the manner of the fair incognito, no wonder nor exultation. She merely asked the man a question or two, and dismissed him without a message. Her bearing suited him to a charm. It was that of a sultana receiving tribute.

“What a hand—what an incomparable hand!” was his next thought. One of his very few coxcomberies was a passion for beautiful hands, and it had its full gratification in the one which lay beside his vase, with whose whiteness it did not suffer in comparison. It was not small, but was exquisitely shaped, full, smooth and tapering, with not an irregular protuberance to detract from its graceful outlines. It set his fancy at a new picture. He imagined himself at his little mosaic chess-table—which was so small that any two at it were in very sociable proximity—and that snowy hand at the other side. Then he looked at her forehead, which was large and nobly developed—he was something of a phrenologist—and he decided that she had a genius for chess, consequently, that his recent purchase of chess-men might thus be suitably transferred. Accordingly, he hurried off to send it, but after he had done so, he found, on returning, his place occupied by a crowd.

The room had filled, and disappointed and abstracted he wandered about for an hour before he found an opportunity to speak to Creswell. The latter at length approached him, saying,

“I have a message for you from a lady.”

“What lady?” asked Saybrooke, eagerly, hoping it was the lady—the only one he cared about at the moment.

“The one to whom you sent your vase and chess-men; she says that if you don’t take them back she will offer them for sale anew.”

“I hope she did not think me impertinent in sending them?” said Saybrooke, looking alarmed, “how did she discover that it was I?”

“It was easy to ascertain by whom they were purchased, and she judged accordingly.”

“Then you know her?”

“Certainly.”

“Pray introduce me, won’t you?—immediately, if you please, my dear Creswell.”

“I would rather not. You won’t like her—for a very material reason.”

“I will—positively—I do like her—I’m half in love already.”

“With her face, you mean—that’s a pretty scrape for a man of twenty-six to get into! however, I may have an opportunity after a while, so be patient. There’s a fine figure,” he continued, looking through a glass he had picked up from a table, and then handing it to Saybrooke—“there in that recess—the lady with her back towards us.”

“Very fine, but the glass contracts too much; at full size I dare say the proportions would scarcely appear so perfect. Who is she?”

“A particular favorite of mine, the owner of this shawl, which I am carrying to her. Come along, and you shall have a nearer view.”

The lady was at the farther end of the saloon, and with some difficulty they threaded their way towards her. She was talking, and still had her back towards them. “A fine figure, indeed,” said Saybrooke, as they advanced, “but, she seems—isn’t she rather large?—why, upon my word—Creswell—she must be full five feet nine, if not ten!” and, putting his arm through his friend’s, he was drawing him in another direction.

“Stop! don’t jerk me off my feet, my dear fellow!” said Creswell; “I must go on to deliver the shawl; allow me, Miss Grainger,” he continued, “to present my friend, Mr. Saybrooke—” and as the lady turned round to curtsey, Saybrooke recognized the brilliant face of the post-office.

Never was there a more instantaneous revolution. “I’ll call you out for this night’s work!” whispered Saybrooke, while the lady was replying to the parting compliments of her former companions. Creswell pretended to look very much surprised, and after a little while, when he made a move to proceed, Saybrooke gave him a deprecatory shake of the head, at which they parted for the night.

The next morning Creswell called at the lodgings of his friend. “I am glad,” said he, “that you were not disappointed in Miss Grainger.”

“Disappointed!—she is the most fascinating woman I ever met with—full of sweetness, feeling, and intellect! I do not remember to have enjoyed a conversation more in my life than the one we had as I escorted her home last night”

“Why, Saybrooke! you certainly did not do that? she is unquestionably large enough to take care of herself!”

“You are an impudent dog, Creswell,” returned Saybrooke, laughing.

“But, seriously, Saybrooke, it is a great pity that Miss Grainger is so large; to a man of your sentiments, who never could see a woman over the medium height without thinking of an ogress, it must very much neutralize the effect of her unrivalled face, her winning manners, and her delightfully spirituelle conversation.”

“If you’ll oblige me by remaining civilly quiet, for a few minutes, I’ll tell you how I argued that point. I stated to myself that the larger women I had seen were as small ones examined through a magnifying glass, every defect being thus rendered more apparent. Now, I continued, here is a woman of the magnified size, without a single defect, and she is of course entitled to a magnified portion of admiration.”

“Very good.”

“And then I recollected that I was not the first who had come to such a conclusion. That Juno would not have looked the queen of Olympus had she been other than a large woman—that had the rib of Menelaus been but a small bone of contention, Troy might have been standing to this day.”

“Pshaw!” said Creswell.

“And that a man must have a very contracted imagination to fancy a little Venus De Medicis, a little Cleopatra or a little Mary Stuart.”

About six months after this, a gentleman and lady passing, bowed to Creswell through his office window while an acquaintance was sitting with him.

“A magnificent looking couple—who are they?” said the latter.

“The new bride and groom, Stanley Saybrooke, and Martha Grainger, that was. By the by, I made that match.”

“Indeed! how did you accomplish it?”

“Just by persuading the lady to sit still for a few hours. He had a most absurd aversion to large women, and as I knew that Martha, who, in fact, is a sort of cousin of mine, would suit him exactly in other respects, I laid a plan to get him in love with her before he found out her size, so I took him to a fancy-fair, where he saw a great number of her productions, and heard a great deal of her character, and then I contrived to give him a sight of her beautiful face, having, as I said, apprised her that she would oblige me very much by keeping her seat until I gave her notice. That finished the business. He stared till he was conquered, and then the three or four extra inches became very small matters indeed.”

“But now, since they are married, won’t the defects shoot up again?”

“Not at all. I never saw a fellow so proud of a wife. He says that a small casket could not contain so lofty an intellect and so noble a heart!”

LE FAINEANT.

———

BY C. V. HOFFMAN, AUTHOR OF “GREYSLAER,” “THE VIGIL OF FAITH,” ETC.

———

“Now arouse thee, Sir Knight, from thine indolent ease,

Fling boldly thy banner abroad in the breeze,

Strike home for thy lady—strive hard for the prize,

And thy guerdon shall beam from her love-lighted eyes!”

“I shrink not the trial,” that bluff knight replied⁠—

“But I battle—not I—for an unwilling bride;

Where the boldest may venture to do and to dare,

My pennon shall flutter—my bugle peal there!

“I quail not at aught in the struggle of life,

I’m not all unproved even now in the strife,

But the wreath that I win, all unaided—alone,

Round a faltering brow it shall never be thrown!”

“Now fie on thy manhood, to deem it a sin

That she loveth the glory thy falchion might win,

Let them doubt of thy prowess and fortune no more,

Up! Sir Knight, for thy lady—and do thy devoir!”

“She hath shrunk from my side, she hath failed in her trust,

Not relied on my blade, but remembered its rust;

It shall brighten once more in the field of its fame,

But it is not for her I would now win a name.”

The knight rode away, and the lady she sigh’d,

When he featly as ever his steed would bestride,

While the mould from the banner he shook to the wind

Seemed to fall on the breast he left aching behind.

But the rust on his glaive and the rust in his heart

Had corroded too long and too deep to depart,

And the brand only brightened in honor once more,

When the heart ceased to beat on the fray-trampled shore.

THE DYING MINSTREL TO HIS MUSE.

———

BY WILLIAM FALCONER.

———

Farewell, gentle Muse! fare thee well, and for ever!

No more in the greenwood with thee must I stray:

Thy flowers which I cherished have bloomed but to wither,

Like youth’s vernal wreath, they all faded away:

Yet sweet was the morn, timid Muse, when I sought thee,

In the green ruined tower by the wild Scottish rill;

A heart framed for joy like the wine-cup I brought thee,

With Fancy’s rich draught thou the chalice didst fill.

O soft was thy dawning, thou mental Aurora,

It shed on my morning-dream heaven’s young ray,

With the seraph-wing’d bird through the cloudlets of glory

My soul soared exulting through life’s early day;

Then love’s vernal flush filled my bosom with gladness,

And she whom I loved shared its passion with thee;

She left me to pine in the chill shade of sadness,

Then crossed I in anguish the wide-spreading sea.

But thou wert more faithful, for rocked on the ocean

’Twas thou who mad’st lovely the dreams of my rest,

My spirit went forth on the wings of emotion

To sport with the bird o’er the blue waters’ breast.

Now in my pent bosom life’s last pulses tremble

Like sear fluttering leaves on yon wind-beaten tree,

With spring-loving birds on its boughs that assemble

My soul to the Land of the Spirit shall flee.

Then come, O my wild lyre, my sole earthly treasure,

’Neath Death’s downy pinions come slumber in peace;

Leave the world to the rosy-crown’d vot’ries of Pleasure,

Its garlands must wither—its Bacchanals cease!

Dear Enchantress, farewell! but that friend of my bosom

Revisit once more, o’er the waves’ deafening swell,

Inspire him that one fleeting flowret may blossom

To the memory of him who hath loved him so well!

Paris, France.

HARRY CAVENDISH.

———

BY THE AUTHOR OF “CRUISING IN THE LAST WAR,” THE “REEFER OF ’76,” ETC.

———

THE PRIVATEER.

I remained but a short time in the Arrow after we sailed finally from the port of ——; for happening to fall in with and capture a rakish little schooner, Captain Smyth resolved to arm and send her forth to cruise against the enemy on her own account. A long Tom was accordingly mounted on a pivot amidships, a complement of men placed in her, and the command given to our second lieutenant, with myself for subordinate. Thus equipped, we parted company from our consort, who bore away for the north, while we were to cruise in the Windward Passage.

For several days we met with no adventure. The weather was intensely sultry. He who has never witnessed a noontide calm on a tropical sea can have no idea of the stifling heat of such a situation. The sea is like molten brass; no breath of air is stirring; the atmosphere is dry and parched in the mouth, and the heavens hang over all their canopy of lurid fire, in the very centre of which burns with intense fierceness the meridian sun. The decks, the cabin, and the tops are alike stifling. The awnings may indeed afford a partial shelter from the vertical rays of the sun, but no breeze can be wooed down the eager windsail; while, wherever a stray beam steals to the deck through an opening in the canvass, the turpentine oozes out and boils in the heat, and the planks become as intolerable to the tread as if a furnace was beneath them.

It was on one of the hottest days of the season, and about a fortnight after we parted from the Arrow, that we lay thus becalmed. The hour was high noon. I stood panting for breath by the weather railing, dressed in a thin jacket and without a cravat, feverishly looking out across the ocean to discern, if possible, a mist or cloud or other evidence of an approaching breeze. My watch was in vain. There was no ripple on the deep, but a long monotonous undulation heaved the surface of the water, which glittered far and near like a mirror in which the sun is reflected vertically, paining and almost blinding the gaze. The schooner lay motionless on the ocean, the shadow of her boom shivering in the wave, as the swell undulated along. Silence reigned on the decks. To a spectator at a distance, who could have beheld our motionless shadow in the water, we would have seemed an enchanted ship, hanging midway betwixt the sea and sky.

Noon passed, and the afternoon drew heavily along, yet still no breeze arose to gladden our listless spirits. Two bells struck and then three, but the same monotony continued. Wearied out at length I was about turning from the weather quarter to go below, when I fancied I saw a sail far down on the horizon. I paused and looked intently in the direction where the welcome sight had been visible. For a moment the glare of the sun and the water prevented me from distinguishing with any accuracy whether what I saw was really a sail or not, but at length my doubts were removed by the cry of the look-out on the fore-castle, and before half an hour it became evident that the vessel to windward was a square-rigged craft, but of what size or character it was impossible to determine.

“They must have had a puff of wind up yonder,” remarked the second lieutenant to me, “or else they could not have come within sight so rapidly.”

“But the breeze has left them ere this,” I said, “for they have not moved for the last quarter of an hour.”

“We shall probably know nothing more of them until nightfall, for the wind will scarcely make before sunset, even if it does then. He has the weather gauge. Until I know something more of him I would rather change positions.”

“He is some fat merchantman,” I replied, “we will lighten his plethoric pocket before morning.”

During the afternoon the calm continued, our craft and the stray sail occupying their relative positions. Meantime, innumerable were the conjectures which we hazarded as to the character of our neighbor; and again and again were our glasses put in requisition to see if any thing could be discovered to decide our conflicting opinions. But the royals of a ship, when nothing else of her is visible, give scarcely any clue as to her character; and accordingly hour after hour passed away, and we were still altogether ignorant respecting the flag and strength of our neighbor. Toward sunset, however, signs of a coming breeze began to appear on the seaboard, and when the luminary wheeled his disc down the western line of the horizon, the sea to windward was perceptibly ruffled by the wind.

“Ah! there it comes at last—” said the second lieutenant, “and, by my halidome, the stranger is standing for us. Now, if he will only keep in his present mind until we can get within range of him, I am no officer of the United Colonies if I do not give him some hot work. By St. George, the men have had so little to do of late, and they long so eagerly to whet their palates, that I would venture to attack almost twice our force—eh! Cavendish! You have had such a dare-devil brush with the buccaneers lately that I suppose you think no common enemy is worth a thought.”

“Not altogether,” said I, “but I think we shall have our wish gratified. Yonder chap is certainly twice our size, and he carries his topsails as jauntily as a man-of-war.”

“Faith! and you’re right, Harry,” said my old messmate, as he shut the glass with a jerk, after having, in consequence of my last remark, taken a long look at the strange sail, “that’s no sleepy merchantman to windward. But we’ll swagger up to him, nevertheless; one doesn’t like to run away from the first ship he meets.”

I could not help smiling when I thought of the excuses with which the lieutenant was endeavoring to justify to himself his contemplated attack on a craft that was not only more than twice our size, but apparently an armed cruizer, for I knew the case would have been the same if this had been the hundredth, instead of the first vessel he had met after assuming a separate command, as no man in the corvette had been more notorious for the recklessness with which he invited danger. Perhaps this was the fault of his character. I really believe that he would, if dared to it, have run into Portsmouth itself, and fired the British fleet at anchor. In our former days, when we had been fellow officers on board the Arrow, we had often differed on this trait in his character, and perhaps now he felt called on, from a consciousness of my opinion, to make some excuse to me for his disregard of prudence in approaching the stranger; for, as soon as the breeze had made, he had close-hauled the schooner, and, during the conversation I have recorded, we were dashing rapidly up towards the approaching ship.

As we drew nearer to the stranger, my worst suspicions became realized. Her courses loomed up large and ominous, and directly her hammock nettings appeared, and then her ports opened to our view, six on a side; while, almost instantaneously with our discovery of her force, a roll of bunting shot up to her gaff, and, unrolling, disclosed the cross of St. George. There was now no escape. The enemy had the weather gauge, and was almost within closing distance. However prudent a more wary approach might have been hitherto, there was no longer any reason for the exercise of caution. It would be impossible for us now to avoid a combat, or get to windward by any manœuvre; and to have attempted to escape by going off before the wind would have been madness, since of all points of sailing that was the worst for our little craft. Gloomy, therefore, as the prospect appeared for us, there was no hesitation, but each man, as the drum called us to quarters, hurried to his post with as much alacrity as if we were about to engage an inferior force, instead of one so overwhelmingly our superior.

The moon had by this time risen and was calmly sailing on, far up in the blue ether, silvering the deep with her gentle radiance, and showering a flood of sparkles on every billowy crest that rolled up and shivered in her light. Everywhere objects were discernible with as much distinctness as under the noon-day sun. The breeze sang through our rigging with a joyous sound, singularly pleasing after the silence and monotony of the day; and the waves that parted beneath our cut-water rolled glittering astern along our sides, while ever and anon some billow, larger than its fellows, broke over the bow, sending its foam crackling back to the foremast. Around the deck our men were gathered, each one beside his allotted gun, silently awaiting the moment of attack. The cutlasses had been served out; the boarding pikes and muskets were placed convenient for use; the balls had already been brought on deck; and we only waited for some demonstration on the part of the foe to open our magazine and commence the combat in earnest. At length, when we were rapidly closing with him, the enemy yawed, and directly a shot whistled high over us.

“Too lofty by far, old jackanapes,” said the captain of our long Tom, “we’ll pepper you after a different fashion when it comes to our turn to serve out the iron potatoes. Ah! the skipper’s tired of being silent,” he continued, as Mr. Vinton ordered the old veteran to discharge his favorite piece, “we’ll soon see who can play at chuck-farthing the best, my hearty. Bowse away, boys, with that rammer—now we have her in a line—a little lower, just a trifle more—that’s it—there she goes;” and as he applied the match, the flame streamed from the mouth of the gun, a sharp, quick report followed, and the smoke, clinging a moment around the piece in a white mass, broke into fragments and eddied away to leeward on the gale; while the old veteran, stepping hastily aside, placed his hand over his eyes, and gazed after the shot, with an expression of intense curiosity stamped on every feature of his face. Directly an exulting smile broke over his countenance, as the fore-top-sail of the ship fell—the ball having hit the yard.

“By the holy and thrue cross,” said a mercurial Irishman of the old veteran’s crew, “but he has it there—hurrah! Give it to him nately again—it’s the early thrush that catches the early worm.”

“Home with the ball there, my hearties,” sung out the elated veteran, “she is yawing to let drive at us—there it comes. Give her as good as she sends.”

The enemy was still, however, at too great a distance to render her fire dangerous, and after a third shot had been exchanged betwixt us—for the stranger appeared to have, like ourselves, but a single long gun of any weight—this distant and uncertain firing ceased, and both craft drew steadily towards each other, determined to fight the combat, as a gallant combat should be fought, yard arm to yard arm.

The wind had now freshened considerably, and we made our way through the water at the rate of six knots an hour. This soon brought us on the bows of the foe. Our guns, meanwhile, had been hastily shifted from the starboard to the larboard side, so that our whole armament could be brought to bear at once on the ship. As we drew up towards the enemy a profound silence reigned on our deck—each man, as he stood at his gun, watching her with curious interest. We could see that her decks were well filled with defenders, and that marksmen had been posted in the tops to pick off our crew. But no eye quailed, no nerve flinched, as we looked on this formidable array. We felt that there was nothing left for us but to fight, since flight was alike dishonorable and impossible.

At length we were within pistol shot of the foe, and drawing close on to his bows. The critical moment had come. That indefinable feeling which even a brave man will feel when about engaging in a mortal combat, shot through our frames as we saw that our bowsprit was overlapping that of the enemy, and knew that in another minute some of us would perhaps be in another world. But there was little time for such reflections now. The two vessels, each going on a different tack, rapidly shot by each other, and, in less time than I have taken to describe it, we lay broadside to broadside, with our bows on the stern of the foe, and our tafferel opposite his foremast. Until now not a word had been spoken on board either ship; but the moment the command to fire was passed from gun to gun, a sheet of flame instantaneously rolled along our sides, making our light craft quiver in every timber. The rending of timbers, the crash of spars, and the shrieks of the wounded, heard over even the roar of battle, told us that the iron missiles had sped home, bearing destruction with them. A momentary pause ensued, as if the crew of the enemy had been thrown into a temporary disorder—but the delay was only that of a second or two—and then came in return the broadside of the foe. But this momentary disorder had injured the aim of the Englishman, and most of his balls passed overhead, doing considerable injury however to the rigging. Our men had lain flat on the deck after our discharge, since our low bulwarks afforded scarcely any protection against the fire of the enemy, and when, therefore, his broadside came hurtling upon us, the number of our wounded was far less than under other circumstances would have been possible.

“Thank God! the first broadside is over,” I involuntarily exclaimed, “and we have the best of it.”

“Huzza! we’ll whip him yet, my hearties,” shouted the captain of our long Tom; “give it to him with a will now—pepper his supper well for him. Old Marblehead, after all, against the world!”

With the word our men sprang up from the decks, and waving their arms on high, gave vent to an enthusiastic shout ere they commenced re-loading their guns. The enemy replied with a cheer, but it was less hearty than that of our own men. Little time, however, was lost on either side in these bravados; for all were alike conscious that victory hung, as yet, trembling in the scales.

“Out with her—aye! there she has it,” shouted a grim veteran in my division, “down with the rascally Britisher.”

“Huzza for St. George,” came hoarsely back in reply, as the roar of the gun died on the air, and, at the words, a ball whizzed over my shoulders, and striking a poor fellow behind me on the neck, cut the head off at the shoulders, and while it bore the skull with it in its flight, left the headless trunk spouting its blood, as if from the jet of an engine, over the decks. I turned away sickened from the sight. The messmates of the murdered man saw the horrid sight, but they said nothing, although the terrible energy with which they jerked out the gun, told the fierceness of their revengeful feelings. Well did their ball do its mission; for as the smoke eddied momentarily away from the decks of the enemy, I saw the missile dismount the gun which had fired the last deadly shot, scattering the fragments wildly about, while the appalling shrieks which followed the accident told that more than one of the foe had suffered by that fatal ball.

“We’ve revenged poor Jack, my lads,” said the captain of the gun,—“away with her again. A few more such shots and the day’s our own.”

The combat was now at its height. Each man of our crew worked as if conscious that victory hung on his own arm, nor did the enemy appear to be less determined to win the day. The guns on either side were plied with fearful rapidity and precision. Our craft was beginning to be dreadfully cut up, we had received a shot in the foremast that threatened momentarily to bring it down, and at every discharge of the enemy’s guns one or more of our little crew fell wounded at his post. But if we suffered so severely it was evident that we had our revenge on the foe. Already his mizzen-mast had gone by the board, and two of his guns were dismounted. I fancied once or twice that his fire slackened, but the dense canopy of smoke that shrouded his decks and hung on the face of the water prevented me from observing, with any certainty, the full extent of the damage we had done to the enemy.

For some minutes longer the conflict continued with unabated vigor on the part of our crew; but at the end of that period, the fire of the Englishman sensibly slackened. I could scarcely believe that our success had been so decisive, but, in a few minutes longer, the guns of the enemy were altogether silenced, and directly afterwards a voice hailed from him, saying that he had surrendered. The announcement was met by a loud cheer from our brave tars, and, as the two vessels had now fallen a considerable distance apart, the second lieutenant determined to send a boat on board and take possession. Accordingly, with a crew of about a dozen men, I pushed off from the sides of our battered craft.

As we drew out of the smoke of the battle we began to see the real extent of the damage we had done. The ship of the enemy lay an almost perfect wreck on the water, her foremast and mizzen-mast having both fallen over her side; while her hull was pierced in a continuous line, just above water mark, with our balls. Here and there her bulwarks had been driven in, and her whole appearance betokened the accuracy of our aim. I turned to look at the schooner. She was scarcely in a better condition, for the foremast had by this time given way, and her whole larboard side was riddled with the enemy’s shot. A dark red stream was pouring out from her scuppers, just abaft the mainmast. Alas! I well knew how terrible had been the slaughter in that particular spot. I turned my eyes from the melancholy spectacle, and looked upwards to the calm moon sailing in the clear azure sky far overhead. The placid countenance of the planet seemed to speak a reproof on the angry passions of man. A moment afterward we reached the captured ship.

As I stepped on deck I noticed that not one solitary individual was to be seen; but in the shattered gun-carriage, and the dark stains of blood on the deck, I beheld the evidences of the late combat. The whole crew had apparently retreated below. At this instant, however, a head appeared above the hatchway and instantly vanished. I was not long in doubt as to the meaning of this strange conduct, for, almost immediately a score of armed men rushed up the hatchway, and advancing toward us demanded our surrender. I saw at once the dishonorable stratagem. Stung to madness by the perfidy of the enemy, I sprang back a few steps to my men, and rallying them around me, bid the foe come on. They rushed instantly upon us, and in a moment we were engaged in as desperate a mêlée as ever I had seen.

“Stand fast, my brave lads,” I cried, “give not an inch to the cowardly and perfidious villains.”

“Cut him down, and sweep them from the decks,” cried the leader of the men, stung to the quick by the taunt of cowardice. “St. George against the rebels.”

A brawny desperado at the words made a blow at me with his cutlass, but hastily warding it off I snatched a pistol from my belt, and fired at my antagonist, who fell dead to the deck. The next instant the combat became general. Man to man, and foot to foot, we fought, desperately contesting every inch of deck, each party being conscious that the struggle was one of life or death. The clashing of cutlasses, the crack of fire-arms, the oaths, the shouts, the bravado, the shrieks of the wounded, and the dull heavy fall of the dead on the deck, were the only sounds of which we were conscious during that terrible mêlée, and these came to our ears not in their usual distinctness, but mingled into one fearful and indescribable uproar. For myself, I scarcely heard the tumult. My whole being was occupied in defending myself against a Herculean ruffian who seemed to have singled me out from my crew, and whom it required all my skill at my weapon to keep at bay. I saw nothing but the ferocious eye of my adversary; I heard only the quick rattle of our blades. I have said once before that my proficiency at my weapon had passed into a proverb with my messmates, and had I not been such a master of my art, I should, on the present occasion, have fallen a victim to my antagonist. As it was, I received a sharp wound in the arm, and was so hotly pressed by my vigorous foe that I was forced to give way. But this temporary triumph proved the destruction of my antagonist. Flushed with success, he forgot his wariness, and made a lunge at me which left him unprotected. I moved quickly aside, and, seizing my advantage, had buried my steel in his heart before his own sword had lost the impetus given to it by his arm. As I drew out the reeking blade, I became aware, for the first time, of the wild tumult of sounds around me. A hasty glance assured me that we barely maintained our ground, while several of my brave fellows lay on the deck wounded or dying; but before I could see whether the ranks of the foe had been equally thinned, and while yet scarcely an instant had passed since the fall of my antagonist, a loud, clear huzza, swelling over the din of the conflict, rose at my side, and, turning quickly around, I saw to my joy that the shout proceeded from a dozen of our tars who had reached us at that moment in a boat from the schooner. In an instant they were on deck.

“Down with the traitors—no quarter—hew them to the deck,” shouted our indignant messmates as they dashed on the assailants. But the enemy did not wait to try the issue of the combat. Seized with a sudden panic, they fled in all directions, a few jumping overboard, but most of them tumbling headlong down the hatchways.

We were now masters of the deck. As I instantly guessed, the report of the fire-arms had been heard on board the schooner, when, suspecting foul play, a boat had instantly pushed off to our rescue.

“A narrow escape, by Jove!” said my messmate who had come to my aid, “these traitorous cowards had well nigh overpowered you, and if they could have cut your little party off they would, I suppose, have made another attempt on the schooner—God confound the rascals!”

“Your arrival was most opportune,” said I, “a few minutes later and it would have been of no avail.” And then, as I ran my eye over our comparatively gigantic foe, I could not restrain the remark, “It is a wonder to me how we conquered.”

“Faith, and you may well say that,” laughingly rejoined my messmate; “it will be something to talk of hereafter. But the schooner hasn’t come off,” he added, glancing at our craft, “without the marks of this fellow’s teeth. But I had forgot to ask who or what the rascal is.”

The prize proved to be a privateer. She had received so many shot in her hull, and was already leaking so fast, that we concluded to remove the prisoners and blow her up. Her crew were accordingly ordered one by one on deck, handcuffed, and transferred to the schooner. Then I laid a train, lighted it and put off from the prize. Before I reached our craft—which by this time had been removed to some distance—the ship blew up.

We rigged a jury mast, and by its aid reached Charleston, where we refitted. Our capture gave us no little reputation, and while we remained in port we were lionized to our hearts’ content.

Eager, however, to continue the career so gloriously begun, we staid at Charleston no longer than was absolutely necessary to repair our damages. In less than a fortnight we left the harbor, and made sail again for the south.

THE BRIDAL.

A SCENE FROM REAL LIFE.

———

BY ROBERT MORRIS.

———

The scene was one of mirth, and joy, and loveliness, and beauty. Two spacious parlors had been thrown open in one of the largest houses in Arch street. Lights had glittered in the various chambers since early sundown—carriages by dozens had driven up to the door, each freighted with friends or relatives, so that the world without found little difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that some extraordinary scene of festivity was in progress within the walls of that spacious mansion.

It was about nine o’clock when we entered. The two large parlors, brilliantly illuminated by gas, and glittering with a rich collection of young and beautiful females, each dressed in the most tasteful or gorgeous manner, presented a scene truly magnificent. For a moment the eye seemed to quail before the general flash, while the mind also grew dizzy; but these feelings lasted but for the instant, as friends were to be met on all sides, and we soon found ourselves mingling in the giddy and trifling conversation that too many of our fair countrywomen seem to delight in on such occasions. Still, as the first flash passed by, we paused to contemplate the scene in a calmer and more meditative spirit.

The party was a “Bridal” one, and the bride was the daughter of one of our most respectable merchants, a worthy, good-hearted man, who had devoted himself to his business, and paid no attention whatever to the frivolities of fashionable life. The bride seemed very young—not more than sixteen or seventeen. She could not be regarded as beautiful in the general appreciation of the word, and yet she had one of the sweetest faces that we ever saw. She had soft blue eyes, brown hair which fell over her shoulders in ringlets, a pretty and expressive mouth, with teeth that appeared to us faultless. Her complexion was clear, but her face looked rather pale, although at times it became flushed and ruddy as the rose. Her dress was of the richest white satin, and the ornaments of her hair and neck and wrists consisted almost exclusively of pearls. Her frame was slight and full of symmetry, and her voice was remarkable for the gentleness and amiability of its tone. We gazed upon her calmly for many minutes, and the thought passed through our mind—“So young, so fair, so delicate, so happy, and yet so willing to enter upon the severe responsibilities of the wife and the mother.” “Who,” we inquired of ourselves, “may read that young creature’s destiny? Doubtless she loves the object of her choice with a woman’s virgin and devoted love—doubtless she believes that the next sixteen years of her life will prove radiant with happiness, even more so than the girlish and sunny period which has but just gone by—and doubtless the youth who has won that gentle heart believes that he possesses the necessary requisites of mind and disposition to render her happy. And yet how often has the bright cup of joy been dashed from the lips of woman when about to quaff it! How often does man prove recreant and false! How often is he won from his home and his young wife, whose heart gives way slowly, but fatally and steadily, under the influence of such indifference and neglect!” But we paused and dismissed these gloomy reflections. The nuptial ceremony was pronounced—for a moment all was breathless silence—and then the busy hum broke forth as audibly as ever. The wedding was a brilliant one in all respects. It was followed up by party after party, so that nearly a month rolled away before the giddy round was over. The only one who did not appear to mingle fully in the general feeling, was the mother of the bride. She loved her daughter so tenderly that it seemed impossible for her to consign her to other hands. She was one of those women who devote themselves wholly to their children, and who have no world without them. On the night of the wedding, a tear would occasionally roll down her cheek as she gazed upon her chaste child, and as a tide of maternal recollections melted all her soul!

The world rolled on. We frequently saw the young bride in the streets, and her cousin, who was our immediate neighbor, spoke of her prospects as cheering and happy. But one evening, just after sundown, and less than a year since we had seen each other at the wedding, he called, and with rather a grave aspect invited us to accompany him for a few minutes to the house of his aunt—the same house that had glittered with so much light, and re-echoed with so much laughter on the night of the Bridal. We proceeded along calmly, for although somewhat struck by the sedate aspect of our friend, it did not excite much surprise. On arriving at the house, the first objects that attracted attention were the closed and craped windows, and the awful silence that seemed to “breathe and sadden all around.” Our friend still refrained from speaking, but led on to the Chamber of Death! Our worst apprehensions were realized. The fair young creature, who less than a year before had stood before us radiant with loveliness and hope, was now still, pale, and cold in the icy embrace of death. Her last agonies were dreadful, but the sweet, soft smile, that told of a gentle heart, still lingered on her features. Her infant survived,—but the sudden decease of that cherished one shed a gloom over that home and its happy household, which is not yet totally dispelled. The windows of the dwelling are still bowed, and the afflicted mother, although a sincere Christian, and anxious to yield in a Christian spirit to the decrees of Divine Providence, frequently finds herself melting in tears, and her whole soul convulsed with grief at the memory of her dear Clara.

And such are human hopes and expectations!

THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS.

———

BY MRS. FRANCES S. OSGOOD.

———

PART I.

Serene in the moonlight the pure flowers lay;

All was still save the plash of the fountain’s soft play;

And white as its foam gleamed the walls of the palace;

But within were hot lips quaffing fire from the chalice;

For Herod, the Tetrarch, was feasting that night

The lords of Machærus, and brave was the sight!

Yet mournful the contrast, without and within,

Here were purity, peace,—there were riot and sin!

The vast and magnificent banquetting room

Was of marble, Egyptian, in form and in gloom;

And around, wild and dark as a demon’s dread thought,

Strange shapes, full of terror, yet beauty, were wrought.

Th’ ineffable sorrow, that dwells in the face

Of the Sphynx, wore a soft and mysterious grace,

Dim, even amid the full flood of light poured

From a thousand high clustering lamps on the board;

Those lamps,—each a serpent of jewels and gold,⁠—

That seemed to hiss forth the fierce flame as it rolled.

Back flashed to that ray the rich vessels that lay

Profuse on the tables in brilliant array;

And clear thro’ the crystal the glowing wine gleamed,

And dazzling the robes of the revellers seemed,

While Herod, the eagle-eyed, ruled o’er the scene,

A lion in spirit, a monarch in mien.

The goblet was foaming, the revel rose high.

There were pride and fierce joy in the haughty king’s eye,

For his chiefs and his captains bowed low at his word,

And the feast was right royal that burden’d the board.

Lo! light as a star thro’ a gathered cloud stealing,

What spirit glanced in ’mid the guard at the door?

Their stern bands divide, a fair figure revealing;

She bounds, in her beauty, the dim threshold o’er.

Her dark eyes are lovely with tenderest truth;

The bloom on her cheek is the blossom of youth;

And the smile, that steals thro’ it, is rich with the ray

Of a heart full of love and of innocent play.

Soft fall her fair tresses her light form around;

Soft fall her fair tresses, nor braided nor bound;

And her white robe is loose, and her dimpled arms bare;

For she is but a child, without trouble or care;

Now round the glad vision wild music is heard,⁠—

Is she gifted with winglets of fairy or bird;

For, lo! as if borne on the waves of that sound,

With white arms upwreathing, she floats from the ground.

Still glistens the goblet,—’tis heeded no more!

And the jest and the song of the banquet are o’er;

For the revellers, spell-bound by beauty and grace,

Have forgotten all earth, save that form and that face.

It is done!—for one moment, mute, motionless, fair,

The phantom of light pauses playfully there;

The next, blushing richly, once more it takes wing,

And she kneels at the footstool of Herod the King.

Her young head is drooping, her eyes are bent low,

Her hands meekly crossed on her bosom of snow,

And, veiling her figure, her shining hair flows,

While Herod, flushed high with the revel, arose.

Outspake the rash monarch,—“Now, maiden, impart,

Ere thou leave us, the loftiest hope of thy heart!

By the God of my fathers! what e’er it may be,⁠—

To the half of my kingdom,—’tis granted to thee!”

The girl, half-bewildered, uplifted her eyes,

Dilated with timid delight and surprise,

And a swift, glowing smile o’er her happy face stole,

As if some sunny wish had just woke in her soul.

Will she tell it? Ah, no! She has caught the wild gleam

Of a soldier’s dark eye, and she starts from her dream;

Falters forth her sweet gratitude,—veils her fair frame,⁠—

And glides from the presence, all glowing with shame.

PART II.

Of costly cedar, rarely carved, the royal chambers ceiling,

The columned walls, of marble rich, its brightest hues revealing;

Around the room a starry smile the lamp of crystal shed,

But warmest lay its lustre on a noble lady’s head;

Her dark hair, bound with burning gems, whose fitful lightning glow,

Is tame beside the wild, black eyes that proudly flash below:

The Jewish rose and olive blend their beauty in her face;

She bears her in her high estate with an imperial grace;

All gorgeous glows with orient gold the broidery of her vest;

With precious stones its purple fold is clasped upon her breast;

She gazes from her lattice forth. What sees the lady there?

A strange, wild beauty crowns the scene,—but she has other care!

Far off fair Moab’s emerald slopes, and Jordan’s lovely vale;

And nearer,—heights where fleetest foot of wild gazelle would fail;

While crowning every verdant ridge, like drifts of moonlit snow,

Rich palaces and temples rise, around, above, below,

Gleaming thro’ groves of terebinth, of palm, and sycamore,

Where the swift torrents dashing free, their mountain music pour;

And arched o’er all, the Eastern heaven lights up with glory rare

The landscape’s wild magnificence;—but she has other care!

Why flings she thus, with gesture fierce, her silent lute aside?

Some deep emotion chafes her soul with more than wonted pride;

But, hark! a sound has reached her heart, inaudible elsewhere,

And hushed, to melting tenderness, the storm of passion there!

The far-off fall of fairy feet, that fly in eager glee,

A voice, that warbles wildly sweet, some Jewish melody!

She comes! her own Salomé comes! her pure and blooming child!

She comes, and anger yields to love, and sorrow is beguiled:

Her singing bird! low nestling now upon the parent breast,

She murmurs of the monarch’s vow with girlish laugh and jest:⁠—

“Now choose me a gift and well!

There are so many joys I covet!

Shall I ask for a young gazelle?

’Twould be more than the world to me;

Fleet and wild as the wind,

Oh! how I would cherish and love it!

With flowers its neck I’d bind,

And joy in its graceful glee.

“Shall I ask for a gem of light,

To braid in my flowing ringlets?

Like a star thro’ the veil of night,

Would glisten its glorious hue;

Or a radiant bird, to close

Its beautiful, waving winglets

On my bosom in soft repose,

And share my love with you!”

She paused,—bewildered, terror-struck; for, in her mother’s soul,

Roused by the promise of the king, beyond her weak control,

The exulting tempest of Revenge and Pride raged wild and high,

And sent its storm-cloud to her brow, its lightning to her eye!

Her haughty lip was quivering with anger and disdain,

Her beauteous, jewelled hands were clenched, as if from sudden pain.

“Forgive,” Salomé faltering cried, “Forgive my childish glee!

’Twas selfish, vain,—oh! look not thus! but let me ask for thee!”

Then smiled,—it was a deadly smile,—that lady on her child,

And “Swear thou’ll do my bidding, now!” she cried, in accents wild:

“Ah! when, from earliest childhood’s hour, did I thine anger dare!

Yet, since an oath thy wish must seal,—by Judah’s hopes, I swear!”

Herodias stooped,—one whisper brief!—was it a serpent’s hiss,

That thus the maiden starts and shrinks beneath the woman’s kiss?

A moment’s pause of doubt and dread!—then wild the victim knelt,⁠—

“Take, take my worthless life instead! Oh! if thou e’er hast felt

A mother’s love,—thou canst not doom—no, no! ’twas but a jest!

Speak!—speak! and let me fly once more, confiding, to thy breast!”

A hollow and sepulchral tone was hers who made reply:

“The oath! the oath!—remember, girl! ’tis registered on high!”

Salomé rose,—mute, moveless stood as marble, save in breath,

Half senseless in her cold despair, her young cheek blanched like death!

But an hour since, so joyous, fond, without a grief or care,

Now struck with wo unspeakable,—how dread a change was there!

“It shall be done!” was that the voice that rang so gaily sweet,

When, innocent and blest she came, but now, with flying feet?

“It shall be done!” she turns to go, but, ere she gains the door,

One look of wordless, deep reproach she backward casts,—no more!

But late she sprang the threshold o’er, a light and blooming child,

Now, reckless, in her grief she goes a woman stern and wild.

PART III.

With pallid check, dishevelled hair, and wildly gleaming eyes,

Once more before the banquetters, a fearful phantom flies!

Once more at Herod’s feet it falls, and cold with nameless dread

The wondering monarch bends to hear. A voice, as from the dead,

From those pale lips, shrieks madly forth,—“Thy promise, king, I claim,

And if the grant be foulest guilt,—not mine,—not mine the blame!

Quick, quick recall that reckless vow, or strike thy dagger here,

Ere yet this voice demand a gift that chills my soul with fear!

Heaven’s curse upon the fatal grace that idly charmed thine eyes!

Oh! better had I ne’er been born than be the sacrifice!

The word I speak will blanch thy cheek, if human heart be thine,

It was a fiend in human form that murmured it to mine.

To die for me! a thoughtless child! for me must blood be shed!

Bend low,—lest angels hear me ask!—oh! God!—the Baptist’s head!”

THE LIGHTNING OF THE WATERS.

———

BY DR. REYNELL COATES.

———

There are few phenomena observable on the ocean, more striking than the phosphorescence of the water, when seen in high perfection. It has forcibly attracted the attention of poets and philosophers in all ages, and many and curious have been the speculations of those who have endeavored to explain the brilliant apparition. In later times, however, the progress of natural science has dissipated the mystery to a considerable extent, destroying a portion of its romantic interest, without, thereby, diminishing its exquisite beauty.

We are well informed, at present, that all the brilliant pyrotechny of Neptune is the effect of animal secretion, not differing essentially in cause from that which ornaments our groves and meadows, when the glow-worms of Europe, the fire-flies of North America, or the fulgoure of the Indies are lighting their fairy love-lanterns beneath the cool, green leaves, or filling the air with their mimic meteors.

To those who are not familiar with microscopic researches, it may seem almost impossible that animal life can be multiplied to such excess in the transparent waters, where not a mote is visible by daylight, as to give rise to the broad and bright illumination of the sea, so frequently observed within the lower latitudes; and many, for this reason, have attributed these night-fires of the deep to the impurity and occasional fermentation of the ocean,—a cause which they esteem more nearly commensurate with the magnificence of the result. Such theorists regard this phosphorescence as similar to that so constantly produced by putrifying fish and decaying wood.

These ideas, as I have stated, are no longer tenable, and the real origin of the phenomenon is better understood. But even now, the few who have witnessed it in full extent, variety, and grandeur—a privilege rarely enjoyed, except by those who have made long voyages, and have become familiar with many seas—are lost in wonder; and, unless professionally devoted to the study of natural history, they find it difficult to credit the assertion, that all these vast displays are mere results of living action.

It may prove interesting, then, to those who are fond of such investigations, to offer some remarks on the multitudinous character of those tribes of simple and transparent beings, which swarm about the surface of the ocean, and may be found continually changing in race and habits, with almost every degree of latitude we traverse.

If you will take the trouble, on some suitable occasion during the month of November or December, to descend into a fashionable oyster cellar, and ask admission to the pile of freshly opened shells stowed in the usual receptacle, which is in some dark vault or closet about the premises, you may chance to witness, on a diminutive scale, the far-famed phosphorescence of the sea, without enduring the heavy immigration tax levied, with unrelenting severity, by the old trident-bearer upon all novices, except, perhaps, a few fortunate favorites.

Take up the shovel that leans against the wall, order the light removed and the door closed, and then proceed to disturb the shells. If they have been taken from the water, where it is purely salt,—and still more certainly if gathered from the beds of blue marine mud that are the favorite resort of the finest oysters—the moment you throw a shovelful upon the top of the pile, the whole mass, jarred by the blow, will become spangled with hundreds of brilliant stars—not in this case pale and silvery, but of the richest golden-green or blue. None of these stars may equal in size the head of the finest pin; but so intense is the light emitted by them, that a single, and scarcely visible point will sometimes illuminate an inch of the surrounding surface, even casting shadows from the little spears of sea-grass growing in its neighborhood.

Choose one of the most conspicuous of these diminutive tapers, and, without removing it from the shell, carry it towards the gas-lamp. As you approach, the brilliancy of the star declines; and when the full flood of light is thrown upon the shell, it nearly, or entirely disappears. If you press your finger rudely upon the spot, you will again perceive the luminous matter diffused, like a fluid, over the surrounding surface, and shining, for an instant, more brightly than ever, even under the immediate glare of the gas. Then all is over. You have crushed one of the glow-worms of the deep—an animal, once probably as vain of his golden flame as you of any of your brilliant endowments—perhaps some sentinel there stationed to alarm his sleeping brethren of the approach of danger—perhaps an animalcular Hero trimming her solitary lamp to guide her chosen one, through more than Leander’s dangers, along the briny path to her rocky bower, beset by all the microscopic monsters of the corallines! At all events, despise it as you may, this little being was possessed of life, susceptible of happiness, and endowed with power to outshine, with inborn lustre, the richest gem in Europe’s proudest diadem!

The sea is filled in many regions, and at various seasons, with incalculable multitudes of living creatures, in structure much resembling this little parasite, but often vastly more imposing in dimensions. The smallest tribes that are able to call attention to their individual existence generally wander, like erratic stars, beneath the waves. They may be seen by thousands shooting past the vessel, on evenings when the moon is absent or obscured, suddenly lighting their torches when the motion of the bow produces a few curling swells and breakers on either hand, and whirling from eddy to eddy, as they sweep along the side and are lost in the wake. From time to time the vessel, in her progress, disturbs some large being of similar powers, who instantly ejects a trail of luminous fluid which, twining, and waving about among contending currents, assumes the semblance of a silver snake. But the most surprising of all proofs of the infinity of life is furnished by those inconceivably numerous bands of shining animalcules, too small for human vision, which in their aggregate effect perform, perhaps, the grandest part in beautifying the night scene on the ocean.

The crest of every wave emits a pale and milky light and every ripple that, urged onward too rapidly before the breeze, expires in spreading its little patch of foam upon the water, increases the mysterious brightness. On a starless evening the novice may find it very difficult to account for the distinctness with which even the distant billows may be traced by their whitened summits, while every other object is thrown into the deepest shade. The gentle radiation from within the foam deceives the eye:—it seems a mere reflection from the surface; and he turns again and again towards the heavens, with the constantly renewed impression, that the moon has found some transient opening in the cloudy canopy through which descends a thin pencil of rays to be glinted back from the edges of the waves.

Though certain portions of the ocean, generally, present but slender proofs of phosphorescence,—such being peculiarly the case within the gloomy limits of the Gulf Stream, for reasons not to be appropriately mentioned here—yet no observing person can have passed a week upon the ocean, or rowed his skiff by night on any of our principal harbors, without becoming familiar with most of the appearances to which allusion has been made. A mere voyage to Europe frequently presents much grander examples; but he who would enjoy the view of the phenomenon in its fullest glory, must “cross earth’s central line” “and brave the stormy spirit of the Cape.”

Let me transport you for a few moments into the midst of the Indian Ocean! The sultry sun of February has been basking all day upon the heated waters from a brassy sky without a cloud—the vapors of the upper regions resembling a thin veil of dust, fiery and glowing, as if recently ejected from the mouth of some vast furnace! But the tyrant has gone to his repose, and we enjoy some respite from his scorching influence. It is not cool, but the temperature is tolerable, and this is much! Leave the observation of the barometer to the captain! You cannot prevent a hurricane, should it be impending. Then trust such cares to those in whom is vested the responsibility, and come on deck with me.

There is no moon—but the “sentinel stars” are all at their post. Observe those broad flashes reflected upward from beneath the bows, and playing brightly upon the jib! At every plunge of the vessel, as she sinks into the trough of the sea, you might read a volume fluently by that mild radiance; and beautiful indeed is the view from the fore stay-sail nettings, looking down upon the curling wreaths on either side of the cut-water, and the long lines of foam thrown off by the swell as the vessel gracefully breasts the coming wave, all glowing like molten silver intermingled with a thousand diamonds!

But I will not lead you thitherward—a noble sight awaits us in our wake. Step to the stern and lean with me over the taffrail. What a glorious vision! For miles abaft, our course presents one long and wide canal of living light—the clear, blue ocean, transparent as air, filling it to repletion; while the darker waters around appear like some dense medium through which superior spirits have constructed this magic path-way for us and us alone, so nicely are its breadth and depth adjusted to the form of our gallant bark. Has not the galaxy been torn from heaven, and whelmed beneath the waves to form that burning road? No! no! Though thousands of bright orbs are set in that nether firmament to strengthen the delusion, yet it cannot be. Night’s stormy cincture never gleamed like this, nor bore such dazzling gems. There it still glimmers with its myriad sparks, athwart the dark blue vault, paled by the radiance of its sea-born rival, while huge globes of fire roll from beneath the keel, and blaze along the silvery track like showers of wandering meteors, but all too gentle in their aspect to be deemed of evil-augury.

Those stars are literally living stars,—that ocean galaxy is formed of living beings only,—and even those meteors, invisible by day, except when they approach unusually near to the surface, are active in pursuit of prey. Observe one closely, and you perceive its motions. Formed like a great umbrella of transparent jelly, with fibres, yards in length, trailing from its margin, and the handle carved into a beautiful group of leaves, it flaps its way regularly through the water with a stately march, and wo to the unfortunate creature that becomes involved in the meshes of its stinging tendrils.

This is no exaggerated picture, for such are the beautiful phenomena occasionally witnessed in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The animals upon whose agency they are dependent, generally become invisible by daylight in consequence of their transparency; but there are certain tribes among them whose peculiar structure renders them conspicuous: and of these one of the most remarkable is known to naturalists by the title of Salpa.

There are many species of the salpæ, but they bear a closer likeness to each other than do most of these simple tribes of being. In form they all resemble diminutive purses, composed of highly transparent jelly, with wide mouths like the ordinary clasp—and strengthened by a net-work of ribbons interwoven with the general texture of the purse. These are designed to supply the place of muscles. The salpæ move through the water by contracting the net-work, so as to render the cavity smaller and expel the water from it with some force; then, relaxing the fibres, they allow their natural elasticity to expand them to their original form; thus drawing in a fresh supply of fluid with which to renew the effort. In this manner they are driven onward, always retreating from the principal orifice of the sac. But I will not detain you with a detailed description of their singular organization. It is enough for our present purpose to state that near the bottom of the purse, within the thickness of its walls, there is a golden spot, as if a solitary coin was there deposited. This spot alone enables us to see the animal distinctly when floating in the water.

When young, these little creatures adhere together in strings or cords arranged like the leaflets of a pinnated leaf, in consecutive pairs, to the number of twenty or more. At that period, the most common species in the South Atlantic rarely exceed one half an inch in length, and the yellow spot hardly equals in size an ordinary grain of sand; yet, in certain regions of the ocean these salpæ swarm in such inconceivable multitudes that the sea assumes the appearance of a sandy shoal for miles in length and breadth. To the depth of many fathoms their delicate bodies are closely huddled together, until the constant repetition of the diminutive colored spots renders the water perfectly opaque, and so increases its consistence that the lighter ripple of the surface breaks upon the edge of the animated bank, while the heavier billows roll on smoothly, with the regular and more majestic motion of the ground swell. In passing through such tracts the speed of the vessel is sometimes sensibly checked by the increased resistance of the medium in which she moves; and when a bucket full of brine is lifted from the sea, it may contain a larger portion of living matter than of the fluid in which it floats.

There can be no reasonable doubt that most of those false shoals which disfigure the older charts—their existence proved upon authorities of known veracity and denied by others no less credible—have really been laid down by navigators who have met with beds of salpæ, and were ignorant of their true nature.

I have never seen these animals emitting light, but it is well known that many phosphorescent animalcules shine only in certain stages of the weather or at certain seasons of the year: and as several distinguished travellers have spoken of their luminous properties, it is at least probable that they or their congeners act an important part in dramas similar to that which has been just described. At all events, their history clearly shows the vastness of the scale of animal existence in the superficial waters of the ocean. But for the little yellow spot within their bodies, they would be totally invisible at the distance of a few feet in their native fluid, and could not interfere appreciably with the progress of the rays of light.

If further proof were necessary to show the incalculable increase of many oceanic tribes, it might be found in the history of living beings much more familiar to the mariner. Most persons have met with notices of the Portuguese man-of-war, called, by naturalists physalia, a living air sac of jelly provided with a sail, armed with a multitude of dependant bottle shaped stomachs, all capable of seizing prey, and colored more beautifully than the rainbow. This splendid creature pursues its way over the waves with all the skill of an accomplished pilot, and furnishes, when caught, one of the most astonishing examples of the adaptation of animal structure to the peculiar wants, and theatre of action of living beings, one of the most striking evidences of Omniscient Wisdom which nature offers to the moralist. The physalia rarely sails in squadrons, but wanders solitary and self-dependent over the tropical seas, a terror even to man, by the power which it possesses of stinging and inflicting pain upon whatever comes in contact with its long, trailing cables.

But there is another little sailor called the velella; unprovided with offensive weapons, though formed in most respects upon a model somewhat similar to that of the physalia, unguarded as the peaceful trader against the piratical attacks of a thousand enemies, its very race would soon become extinct, were it not for its unlimited increase.

Provided with a flat, transparent, oval scale of cartilage, for the support of a gelatinous body, it floats by specific levity, alone, for it has no air vessel—and employs its hundreds of stomachs for ballast. Another scale arising at right angles with the first and covered with thin membrane, supplies it with a sail. This unprotected creature serves as food for many predatory tribes, and of these, the most voracious is the barnacle. The flesh devoured, the scales still float for many days, mere wrecks of these gay vessels.

The velellæ are usually found in fleets, and to convey some idea of their numbers, I may state that on one occasion, when sailing before the western winds, beyond the southern latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, our ship encountered a group of globular masses of a pale yellow color swimming upon the surface and surrounded by fringes of an unknown substance. Each mass resembled the eggs of some great sea-bird, reposing on a nest of buoyant feathers. Taking them with a dip net, from the chains, we found the yellow masses to be globular cryptogamous plants, to every one of which adhered a group of barnacles, far larger than the largest I had ever seen before.[^[1]] Many of these last were so intent upon demolishing their prey, that, even in leaving their native element, to fall into the hands of tyrants more dangerous than themselves, it was not always relinquished. Grasping in their horny arms the unfortunate velellæ, they continued grinding the soft jelly from the tougher cartilage, with an avidity and determination that reminded me strongly of the scene in Byron’s Siege of Corinth, where Alp, the renegade,

“Saw the lean dogs beneath the wall

Hold, o’er the dead, their carnival,

Gorging and growling o’er carcass and limb;

They were too busy to bark at him!”

This drew our attention to the source from which such plentiful supplies of food were obtained, and on examination, the ocean was found literally covered with the scales of the murdered velellæ, faintly distinguishable by their glistening in the sunshine, and interspersed with a few living specimens waiting their turn in the general massacre. We scooped them up by thousands; and for three long days the ship swept onward “dead before the wind” with the steady and scarcely paralleled speed of more than ten knots an hour, thus accomplishing a change of more than seven hundred miles in longitude, before the last remnant of this unhappy fleet was passed.

Though it is not pretended that these little sea-boats possess the phosphorescent quality, their numbers and the wide extent of their flotilla will suffice to render far less wonderful the vastness of those beautiful results of animal secretion which have furnished the subject of this sketch.

But there are other similar and more remarkable phenomena attendant on these brilliant night scenes, that can only be explained, either by supposing that myriads of these aquatic beings are endowed with a community of instinct, or, that the changes of the weather influenced them in such a way as to awaken all their luminous powers upon the instant, without the intervention of any mechanical disturbing cause, in the mere frolic mood of nature.

Those who have visited the Chinese islands, or either of several other well known regions in the Pacific, have been occasionally surprised, on a calm moon-light night, when scarce a swell, and not a ripple is perceptible, to see the ocean suddenly converted into one wide pool of milk! As described by a few observers who have been so fortunate as to witness this rare and strange appearance, the color is so equally diffused over the whole field of view, that all resemblance to the ordinary hue is lost, and yet no wandering stars,—no scattered torches can be seen—not even beneath the bows—so feeble is the intensity of the light emitted, that several have denied the agency of phosphorescence in producing this remarkable effect, and were convinced there was a real change in the nature of the fluid; but others, less enamored of the supernatural, have clearly proved that even this phenomenon is due to the activity of an infinity of animalcules.

The very rarity of such occurrences distinctly shows that the microscopic beings which produce it do not emit their light at all times, and there must exist some cause for this wide-spread and consentaneous action. To community of instinct it can hardly be attributed.

We may understand the fact, wonderful as it may be, that an army of emmets should cross a public road or open space, from field to field, or from forest to forest, fashioning themselves, as they are sometimes known to do, into the form of a snake, by crawling over each other’s backs, by dozens, from the tail to the head of the figure; thus shortening it at one extremity, while they lengthen it at the other, and cause it to advance slowly towards their desired retreat! We may understand this evidence of untaught wisdom, for we see its purpose and its usefulness. Such means enable these defenceless beings to elude the vigilance of their feathery enemies, whose beaks, but for the terror of the mimic reptile, would soon annihilate the weak community.

We may even comprehend that more magnificent display of providential guidance witnessed in the habits of the coral animals, where nations of separate beings, outnumbering a thousand times the living population of the earth and air, enjoy one common life, and build up islands, for the use of man, on models definitely fixed. For here, also, there is purpose, and were it not that every individual of the host performs his proper duty—constructing, here a buttress, there an alcove,—the dash of the billows and the fury of the storm would soon disintegrate the growing structure. The reef that lies athwart the mariner’s path, and strews itself with wrecks, would never rise above the surface, to gather the seeds of vegetation, attract the cool, fresh moisture from the air, and lay foundations for the future happiness and wealth of man.

But how shall we explain an instinct by which myriads of creatures, totally distinct and unconnected, are induced, without apparent end or object, to act in concert over leagues of sea, as it would seem merely to fright the passing voyager! It may be that the action of these animalcules, by which the milky glimmering is occasioned, is involuntary. It may be the result of atmospheric or electric influence upon the living frame, to serve some hidden purpose in their unknown economy; for many things, even in our own organic history, surpass our powers of comprehension; we know neither their nature nor their use. But analogy would lead us to infer the exercise of will in all the various phenomena of phosphorescence, however impenetrable the purpose of its exercise may be. Like the insect songs of a summer night, or the love-light of the glow-worm and the fire-fly, they probably control or guide the motions of the individual or of whole communities.

This idea receives some countenance from the history of a more remarkable example of this sub-marine meteor, witnessed in the southern summer of 1823-4, near the island of Tristan d’Acunha, under circumstances never to be forgotten—and with one short notice of its character I will leave the reader to his reflections upon these wonders of the deep.

The night was dark and damp—the western breeze too light to steady the vessel, and she rolled heavily over the wide swell of the South Atlantic, making it difficult for a landsman to maintain his footing on the deck. A fog-bank, which hung around the northern horizon at sunset, now came sweeping slowly down upon us in the twilight. The captain ordered the light sails furled in expectation of a squall, and we stood leaning together over the bulwarks, watching the mist, which approached more and more rapidly, till it resembled, in the increasing darkness, an immense and toppling wall extending from the water to the clouds, and seemed threatening to crush us beneath it. There was something peculiarly awful in its impenetrable obscurity; and even the crew relinquished their several occupations to gaze on the unusual aspect of the fog. It reached us;—but just at this moment, a flash, like a broad sheet of summer lightning, spread itself over the ocean as far as the eye could reach, but deep below the waves. Five or six times, at intervals, of a few seconds, the flash was repeated, and then the vessel was enveloped in the mist. The breeze immediately quickened; the sailors sprang to their stations, and, for a few minutes, the bustle of preparation for a change of wind attracted the exclusive attention of every one. In this short interval, the narrow belt of vapor had passed off to leeward, and left us bounding merrily along at the rate of ten knots an hour, with a spanking norther full upon our beam, over waves sparkling and dancing in the clear, bright moon-light. But, the lightning of the waters was gone!

CALLORE.

———

BY ALEXANDER A. IRVINE.

———

Thou art ever fair to me⁠—

Fairer than the Autumn moon,

Or a fountain, in its glee,

Singing through the woods of June⁠—

Fairer than a streamlet bright

Flowing on in shimmered light,

Darkling under grassy sedge

Fringing all the river’s edge,

Rippling by the breezes fann’d,

Sliding over silver sand,

Through the meadow gayly ranging

With an aspect ever changing,

Yet with quiet depths below,

And an even, constant flow,

Pensive, musical and slow⁠—

Ever such thou art to me,

Laughing, blue-eyed Callore!

Oh! the stars have sybil tones!

Singing by their golden thrones,

Singing as they watching stand

In their weird and silent land!

But thy voice is sweeter far

Than the music of the star!

Melting on the air at even,

With a mystic sound

Flowing, flowing all around,

’Till the soul is raised to heaven

Oh! at moments such as these

I could kneel on bended knees,

Ever kneel and hear thee sing,

Silent, rapt and worshipping.

As a bark upon the tide

Moving on to symphony,

With its dipping oars beside

Keeping time melodiously,

So thou movest on thy way,

Ever graceful, ever gay.

Or, perchance, in sportive band,

With thy sisters hand in hand,

Swinging all in mystic round⁠—

Thou wilt dance with gentle sound,

A sound as that of fairy feet,

Soft, harmonious and sweet,

As woodland waterfalls at night

Tinkling in the still starlight.

How thine eyes with tears o’erflow

At the troubled tale of wo⁠—

In those eyes I love to look,

They to me are as a book.

There I read without disguise,

And a joy beyond control,

All that in thine inner soul

As upon an altar lies⁠—

Gazing thus, I feel as when

Buried from the haunts of men,

In some quiet shady nook,

Looking downwards in the brook⁠—

I have heard the forest breeze

Wake mysterious melodies,

Bringing sounds of childish play

From the solitudes away,

Singing as a gleesome boy,

Ravishing the soul with joy,

Lifting it on pinions free⁠—

Silver-tonguéd Callore!

Ever, ever thou art meek,

With a mirthful soberness;

None have ever heard thee speak

Of thy passing loveliness⁠—

Thou dost joy to be away

From the garish light of day;

Brooding o’er each holy feeling

Soft across thy bosom stealing;

With thine eyelids downward bent,

Musing in a meek content,

Like a saint upon a shrine

Wrapt in dreams of bliss divine!

Surely, thou art not of earth⁠—

With the angels is thy birth⁠—

Thou hast come awhile, to be

My guide to heaven, Callore!

THE SISTERS.

A TALE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

———

BY H. W. HERBERT, AUTHOR OF “RINGWOOD THE ROVER,” “THE BROTHERS,” “CROMWELL,” ETC. ETC.

———

PART I.

In one of those sweet glens, half pastoral half sylvan, which may be found in hundreds channelling the steep sides of the moorland hills, and sending down the tribute of their pure limestone springs to the broad rapid rivers which fertilize no less than they adorn the lovely vales of Western Yorkshire, there may be seen to this day the ruins of an old dwelling-house, situate on a spot so picturesque, so wild, and yet so soft in its romantic features, that they would well repay the traveller for a brief halt, who, but too often, hurries onward in search of more remote yet certainly not greater beauties. The gorge, within the mouth of which the venerable pile is seated, opens into the broader valley from the north-eastern side, enjoying the full light and warmth of the southern sunshine; and, although very narrow at its origin, where its small crystal rivulet springs up from the lonely well-head, fringed by a few low shrubs of birch and alder, expands here, at its mouth, into a pretty amphitheatre or basin of a few acres circuit. A wild and feathery coppice of oak, and birch, and hazel, with here and there a mountain ash, showing its bright red berries through the rich foliage, clothes all the lower part of the surrounding slopes; while, far above, the seamed and shattered faces of the gray, slaty limestone rise up like artificial walls, their summits crowned with the fair purple heather, and every nook and cranny in their sides crowded with odorous wild flowers. Within the circuit of these natural limits, sheltering it from every wind of heaven, except the gentle south, the turf lies smooth and even as if it were a cultured lawn; while a few rare exotic shrubs, now all run out of shape, and bare, and straggling, indicate even yet the time when it was a fair shrubbery, tended by gentle hands, and visited by young and lovely beings, now cold in their untimely sepulchres. The streamlet, which comes gushing down the glen with its clear, copious flow, boiling and murmuring about the large gray boulders which everywhere obstruct its channels, making a thousand mimic cataracts, and wakening ever a wild, mirthful music, sweeps here quite close to the foot of the eastern cliff, the feathery branches of the oakwood dipping their foliage in its eddies, and then, just as it issues forth into the open champaine, wheels round in a half circle, completely fanning the little amphitheatre above, except at one point hard beneath the opposite hill face, where a small winding horse track, engrossing the whole space between the streamlet and the limestone rock, gives access to the lone demesne. A small green hillock, sloping down gently to the southward, fills the embracing arms of the bright brook, around the northern base of which is scattered a little grove of the most magnificent and noblest sycamores that I have ever seen; but on the other side, which yet retains its pristine character of a smooth open lawn, there are no obstacles to the view over the wide valley, except three old gnarled thorn bushes, uncommon from their size and the dense luxuriance of their matted greenery. It was upon the summit of this little knoll that the old homestead stood, whose massive ruins of red freestone, all overgrown with briers, and tall rank grass and dock leaves, deface the spot which they adorned of old; and, when it was erect in all its fair proportions, the scene which it overlooked, and its own natural attractions, rendered it one of the loveliest residences in all the north of England—the wide, rich, gentle valley, all meadow land or pasture, without one brown ploughed field to mar its velvet green; the tall, thick hawthorn hedges, with their long lines of hedgerow timber, oak, ash and elm, waving above the smooth enclosures; the broad, clear, tranquil river flashing out like a silver mirror through the green foliage; the scattered farm-houses, each nestled as it were among its sheltering orchards; the village spire shooting up from the clump of giant elms which over-shadow the old grave-yard; the steep, long slope on the other side of the vale, or strath, as it would be called in Scotland, all mapped out to the eye, with its green fences and wide hanging woods; and, far beyond, the rounded summits of the huge moorland hills, ridge above ridge, purple, and grand, and massive, but less and less distinct as they recede from the eye, and melt away at last into the far blue distance—such was the picture which its windows overlooked of old, and which still laughs as gaily in the sunshine around its mouldering walls and lonely hearth-stone.

But if it is fair now, and lovely, what was it as it showed in the good old days of King Charles, before the iron hand of civil war had pressed so heavily on England? The grove of sycamores stood there, as they stand now, in the prime and luxuriance of their sylvan manhood; for they are waxing now aged and somewhat gray and stag-horned; and the thorn bushes sheltered, as they do now, whole choirs of thrushes and blackbirds, but all the turf beneath the scattered trees and on the sunny slope was shorn, and rolled, and watered, that it was smooth and even, and far softer than the most costly carpet that ever wooed the step of Persian beauty. The Hall was a square building, not very large, of the old Elizabethan style, with two irregular additions, wings, as they might be called, of the same architecture, though of a later period, and its deep-embayed oriel windows, with their fantastic mullions of carved freestone, its tall quaint chimneys, and its low porch, with overhanging canopy and clustered columns, rendered it an object singularly picturesque and striking. The little green within the gorge of the upper glen, which is so wildly beautiful in its present situation, left as it is to the unaided hand of nature, was then a perfect paradise; for an exquisite taste had superintended its conversion into a sort of untrained garden; an eye well used to note effects had marked its natural capabilities, and, adding artificial beauties, had never trenched upon the character of the spot by anything incongruous or startling. Rare plants, rich-flowering shrubs, and scented herbs were indeed scattered with a lavish hand about its precincts, but were so scattered that they seemed the genuine productions of the soil; the Spanish cistus had been taught to carpet the wild crags in conjunction with the native thyme and heather; the arbutus and laurestinus had been brought from afar to vie with the mountain ash and holly; the clematis and the sweet scented vine blended their tendrils with the rich English honeysuckle and the luxuriant ivy; rare lotuses might be seen floating with their azure colored cups and broad green leaves upon the glassy basins, into which the mountain streamlet had been taught to expand, among the white wild water lilies and the bright yellow clusters of the marsh marigold; roses of every hue and scent, from the dark crimson of Damascus to the pale blush of soft Provence, grew side by side with the wild wood-brier and the eglantine, and many a rustic seat, of mossy stone or roots and unbarked branches, invited the loitering visiter in every shadowy angle.

There was no spot in all the north of England whereon the winter frowned so lightly as on those sheltered precincts—there was no spot whereon spring smiled so early, and with so bright an aspect—wherein the summer so long lingered, pouring her gorgeous flowers, rich with her spicy breath, into the very lap of autumn. It was, indeed, a sweet spot, and as happy as it was sweet and beautiful, before the curse of civil war was poured upon the groaning land, with its dread train of foul and fiendish ministers; and yet it was not war, nor any of its direct consequences, that turned that happy home into a ruin and a desolation. It was not war—except the struggles of the human heart—the conflict of the fierce and turbulent passions—the strife of principles, of motives, of desires, within the secret soul, maybe called war, as, indeed, they might, and that with no figurative tongue, for they are surely the hottest, the most devastating, the most fatal of all that bear that ominous and cruel appellation.

Such was the aspect then of Ingleborough Hall, at the period when it was perhaps the most beautiful; and when, as is but too often the case, its beauties were on the very point of being brought to a close forever. The family which owned the manor, for the possessions attached to the old homestead were large, and the authority attached to them extended over a large part of Upper Wharfdale, was one of those old English races which, though not noble in the literal sense of the word, are yet so ancient, and so indissolubly connected with the soil, that they may justly be comprised among the aristocracy of the land. The name was Saxon, and it was generally believed—and probably with truth—that the date of the name, and of its connection with that estate, was at the least coeval with the conquest. To what circumstances it was owing that the Hawkwoods, for such was the time-honored appellation of the race, had retained possession of their fair demesne when all the land was allotted out to feudal barons and fat priests, can never now be ascertained; nor does it indeed signify; yet that it was to some honorable cause, some service rendered, or some high exploit, may be fairly presumed from the fact that the mitred potentate of Bolton Abbey, who levied his tythes far and near throughout those fertile valleys, had no claims on the fruits of Ingleborough. During the ages that had passed since the advent of the Norman William, the Hawkwoods had never lacked male representatives to sustain the dignity of their race; and gallantly had they sustained it; for in full many a lay and legend, aye! and in grave, cold history itself, the name of Hawkwood might be found side by side with the more sonorous appellations of the Norman feudatories, the Ardens, and Maulevers, and Vavasours, which fill the chronicles of border warfare. At the period of which we write, however, the family had no male scion—the last male heir, Ralph Hawkwood, had died some years before, full of years and of domestic honors—a zealous sportsman, a loyal subject, a kind landlord, a good friend—his lot had fallen in quiet times and pleasant places, and he lived happily, and died in the arms of his family, at peace with all men. His wife, a calm and placid dame, who had, in her young days, been the beauty of the shire, survived him, and spent her whole time, as she devoted her whole mind and spirit, in educating the two daughters, joint heiresses of the old manor-houses, who were left by their father’s death, two bright-eyed fair-haired prattlers, dependent for protection on the strong love but frail support of their widowed mother.

Years passed away, and with their flight the two fair children were matured into two sweet and lovely women; yet the same fleeting suns which brought to them complete and perfect youth were fraught to others with decay, and all the carking cares, and querulous ailments of old age. The mother, who had watched with keen solicitude over their budding infancy, over the promise of their lovely childhood, lived indeed, but lived not to see or understand the full accomplishment of that bright promise. Even before the elder girl had reached the dawn of womanhood, palsy had shaken the enfeebled limbs, and its accustomed follower—mental debility—had, in no small degree, impaired the intellect of her surviving parent; but long before her sister had reached her own maturity, the limbs were helplessly immovable, the mind was wholly clouded and estranged. It was not now the wandering and uncertain darkness that flits across the veiled horizon of the mind alternately with vivid gleams, flashes of memory and intellect, brighter perhaps than ever visited the spirit until its partial aberrations had jarred its vital principle—it was that deep and utter torpor, blanker than sleep and duller, for no dreams seem to mingle with its day-long lethargy—that absolute paralysis of all the faculties of soul and body, which is so beautifully painted by the great Roman satirist, as the

“omnii

Membrorum damno major dementia, quæ nec

Homina servorum, nec vultum agnoscit amici

Cum quo præterita cænavit nocti, nec illos

Quos genuit, quos eduxit”—

that still, sad, patient, silent suffering, which sits from day to day in the one usual chair, unconscious of itself and almost so of all around it; easily pleased by trifles, which it forgets as soon, deriving its sole real and tangible enjoyment from the doze in the summer sunshine, or by the sparkling hearth of winter. Such was the mother now; so utterly, so hopelessly dependent on the cares and gratitude of those bright beings whose infancy she had nursed so devotedly—and well was that devotedness now compensated; for day and night, winter and summer, did those sweet girls by turn watch over the frail, querulous sexagenarian—never both leaving her at once, one sleeping while the other watched, attentive ever to her importunate and ceaseless cravings, patient and mild to meet her angry and uncalled for lamentations.

You would have thought that a seclusion so entire, from all society of their equals, must have prevented their acquiring those usual accomplishments, those necessary arts, which every English gentlewoman is presumed to possess as things of course—that they must have grown up mere ignorant, unpolished country lasses, without a taste or aspiration beyond the small routine of their dull daily duties—that long confinement must have broken the higher and more spiritual parts of their fine natural minds—that they must have become mere moping household drudges—and so to think would be so very natural, that it is by no means easy to conceive how it was brought to pass, that the very opposite of this should have been the result. The very opposite it was, however—for as there were not in the whole West Riding two girls more beautiful than Annabel and Marian Hawkwood, so were there surely none so highly educated, so happy in themselves, so eminently calculated to render others happy. Accomplished as musicians both, though Annabel especially excelled in instrumental music, while her young sister was unrivalled in voice and execution as a songstress; both skilled in painting; and if not poetesses in so much as to be stringers of words and rhymes, certainly such, and that too of no mean order, in the wider and far higher acceptation of the word; for their whole souls were attuned to the very highest key of spiritual sensibility—romantic, not in the weak and ordinary meaning of the term, but as admirers of all things high, and pure, and noble—worshippers of the beautiful, whether it were embodied in the wild scenery of their native glens, in the rock, the stream, the forest, the sunshine that clothed all of them in a rich garb of glory, or the dread storm that veiled them all in gloom and terror—or in the master-pieces of the schools of painting and of sculpture—or in the pages of the great, the glorious of all ages—or in the deeds of men, perils encountered hardily, sufferings constantly endured, sorrows assuaged by charitable generosity. Such were they in the strain and tenor of their minds; gentle, moreover, as the gentlest of created things; humble to their inferiors, but with a proud, and self-respecting, and considerate humility; open, and free, and frank toward their equals; but proud, although not wanting in loyalty and proper reverence for the great, and almost haughty of demeanor to their superiors, when they encountered any such, which was, indeed, of rare and singular occurrence. It was a strange thing, indeed, that these lone girls should have possessed such characters, so strongly marked, so powerful and striking; should have acquired accomplishments, so many and so various in their nature. It will appear, perhaps, even stranger to merely superficial thinkers, that the formation of those powerful characters had been, for the most part, brought about by the very circumstances which would at first have appeared most unpropitious—their solitary habits namely, and their seclusion, almost absolute seclusion, from the gay world of fashion and of folly. The large and opulent county, in which their patrimony lay, was indeed then, as now, studded with the estates, the manors, and the parks of the richest and the noblest of England’s aristocracy, yet the deep glens and lofty moorlands among which Ingleborough Hall was situate, are even to this day a lonely and sequestered region; no great post-road winds through their devious passes; and, although in the close vicinity of large and populous towns, they are, even in the nineteenth century, but little visited, and are occupied by a population singularly primitive and pastoral in all its thoughts and feelings. Much more then in those days, when carriages were seen but rarely beyond the streets of the metropolis, when roads were wild and rugged, and intercourse between the nearest places, unless of more than ordinary magnitude, difficult and uncertain, was that wild district to be deemed secluded. So much so, indeed, was this the case, at the time of which I write, that there were not within a circle of some twenty miles two families of equal rank, or filling the same station in society, with the Hawkwoods. This, had the family been in such circumstances of domestic health and happiness as would have permitted the girls to mingle in the gaieties of the neighborhood, would have been a serious and severe misfortune; as they must, from continual intercourse with their inferiors, have contracted, in a greater or less degree, a grossness both of mind and manners; and would, most probably, have fallen into that most destructive habit—destructive to the mind, I mean, and to all chance of progress or advancement—the love of queening it in low society. It was, therefore, under their circumstances, including the loss of one parent and the entire bereavement of the other, fortunate in no small degree that they were compelled to seek their pleasures and their occupations, no less than their duties, within the sphere of the domestic circle.

The mother, who was now so feeble and so helpless, though never a person of much intellectual energy, or indeed of much force of any kind, was yet in the highest sense of the word a lady; she had seen in her youth something of the great world, apart from the rural glens which witnessed her decline; had mingled with the gay and noble even at the court of England, and, being possessed of more than ordinary beauty, had been a favorite and in some degree a belle. From her, then, had her daughters naturally and unconsciously imbibed that easy, graceful finish which, more than all beside, is the true stamp of gentle birth and bearing. Long before children can be brought to comprehend general principles or rules of convention, they can and do acquire habits, by that strange tact of imitation and observance which certainly commences at a stage so early of their young, frail existences, that we cannot, by any effort, mark its first dawning—habits which, thus acquired, can hardly be effaced at all—which will endure unaltered and invariable when tastes, and practices, and modes of thought and action, contracted long, long afterward, have faded quite away and been forgotten. Thus was it, then, with these young creatures; while they were yet mere girls, with all the pure, right impulses of childhood bursting out fresh and fair, they had been trained up in the midst of high, and honorable, and correct associations—naught low, or mean, or little; naught selfish, or dishonest, or corrupt had ever come near to them—in the sight of virtue and in the practice of politeness they had shot up into maturity; and their maturity, of consequence, was virtuous and polished. In after years, devoted as they were to that sick mother, they had no chance of unlearning anything; and thus, from day to day, they went on gaining fresh graces, as it were, by deduction from their foregone teachings, and from the purity of their young natures—for purity and nature, when united, must of necessity be graceful—until the proudest courts of Europe could have shown nothing, even in their most difficult circles, that could surpass, even it could vie with, the easy, artless frankness, the soft and finished courtesy, the unabashed yet modest grace of those two mountain maidens.

At the period when my sad tale commences—for it is no less sad than true—the sisters had just reached the young yet perfect bloom of mature womanhood, the elder, Annabel, having attained her twentieth summer, her sister Marian being exactly one year younger; and certainly two sweeter or more lovely girls could not be pictured or imagined—not in the brightest moments of the painter’s or the poet’s inspiration. They were both tall and beautifully formed—both had sweet low-toned voices—that excellent thing in woman!—but here all personal resemblance ended; for Annabel, the elder, had a complexion pure and transparent as the snow of the untrodden glacier before the sun has kissed it into roseate blushes, and quite as colorless; her features were of the finest classic outline; the smooth, fair brow, the perfect Grecian nose, the short curve of the upper lip, the exquisite arch of the small mouth, the chiselled lines of the soft rounded chin, might have served for a model to a sculptor, whereby to mould a mountain nymph or Naiad; her rich luxuriant hair was of a light and sunny brown, her eyes of a clear, lustrous blue, with a soft, languid, and half melancholy tenderness for their more usual expression, which united well with the calm, placid air which was almost habitual to her beautiful features. To this no contrast more complete could have been offered than by the widely different style of Marian’s loveliness. Though younger than her sister, her figure was more full and rounded—so much so, that it reached the very point where symmetry is combined with voluptuousness—yet was there nothing in the least degree voluptuous in the expression of her bright artless face. Her forehead, higher than Annabel’s, and broader, was as smooth and as white as polished marble; her brows were well-defined and black as ebony, as were the long, long lashes that fringed her laughing eyes—eyes of the brightest, lightest azure that ever glanced with merriment, or melted into love—her nose was small and delicate, but turned a little upwards, so as to add, however, rather than detract from the tout ensemble of her arch, roguish beauty—her mouth was not very small, but exquisitely formed, with lips redder than anything in nature, to which lips can be well compared, and filled with teeth, regular, white and beautifully even—fair as her sister’s, and, like hers, showing every where the tiny veins of azure meandering below the milky skin, Marian’s complexion was yet as bright as morning—faint rosy tints and red, warm blushes succeeding one another, or vanishing away and leaving the cheek pearly white, as one emotion followed and effaced another in her pure, innocent mind. Her hair, profuse in its luxuriant flow, was of a deep dark brown, that might have been almost called black, but for a thousand glancing golden lights and warm rich shadows that varied its smooth surface with the varying sunshine, and was worn in a thick, massive plait low down in the neck behind, while on either side the brow it was trained off and taught to cluster in front of either tiny ear in an abundant maze of interwoven curls, close and mysteriously enlaced as are the tendrils of the wild vine, which, fluttering on each warm and blushing cheek, fell down the swan-like neck in heavy natural ringlets. But to describe her features is to give no idea, in the least, of Marian’s real beauty—there was a radiant, dazzling lustre that leaped out of her every feature, lightning from her quick, speaking eyes, and playing in the dimples of her bewitching smile, that so intoxicated the beholder that he would dwell upon her face entranced, and know that it was lovely, and feel that it was far more lovely, far more enthralling than any he had ever looked upon before; yet, when without the sphere of that enchantment, he should be all unable to say wherein consisted its unmatched attraction.

Between the natural disposition and temperaments of the two sisters there was perhaps even a wider difference than between the characteristics of their personal beauty; for Annabel was calm, and mild, and singularly placid, not in her manners only, but in the whole tenor of her thoughts, and words, and actions; there was a sort of gentle melancholy, that was not altogether melancholy either, pervading her every tone of voice, her every change of feature. She was not exactly grave, nor pensive, nor subdued, for she could smile very joyously at times, could act upon emergencies with readiness, and quickness, and decision, and was at all times prompt in the expression of her confirmed sentiments; but there was a very remarkable tranquillity in her mode of doing every thing she did, betokening fully the presence of a decided principle directing her at every step, so that she was but rarely agitated, even by accidents of the most sudden and alarming character, and never actuated by any rapid impulse. The very opposite of this was Marian Hawkwood; for, although quite as upright and pure minded as her sister, and, what is more, of a temper quite as amiable and sweet, yet was her mood as changeful as an April day; although it was more used to mirth and joyous laughter than to frowns or tears either, yet had she tears as ready at any tale of sorrow as are the fountains of the spring shower in the cloud, and eloquent frowns and eyes that lightened their quick indignation at any outrage, or oppression, or high-handed violence; her cheek would crimson with the tell-tale blood, her flesh would seem to thrill upon her bones, her voice would choke, and her eyes swim with sympathetic drops whenever she read, or spoke, or heard of any noble deed, whether of gallant daring, or of heroic self-denial. Her tongue was prompt always, as the sword of the knight errant, to shelter the defenceless, to shield the innocent, to right the wronged, and sometimes to avenge the absent. Artless herself, and innocent in every thought and feeling, she set no guard on either; but as she felt and thought so she spoke out and acted, fearless even as she was unconscious of any wrong, defying misconstruction, and half inclined to doubt the possibility of evil in the minds of others, so foreign did it seem, and so impossible to her own natural and, as it were, instinctive sense of right.

Yet although such in all respects as I have striven to depict them, the one all quick and flashing impulse, the other all reflective and considerate principle, it was most wonderful how seldom there was any clashing of opinion and diversity of judgment as to what was to be done, what left undone, between the lovely sisters. Marian would, it is true, often jump at once to conclusions, and act as rapidly upon them, at which the more reflective Annabel would arrive only after some consideration—but it did not occur more often that the one had reason to repent of her precipitation than the other of her over caution—neither, indeed, had much cause for remorse of this kind at all, for all the impulses of the one, all the thoughts and principles of the other, were alike pure and kindly. With words, however, it was not quite so; for it must be admitted that Marian oftentimes said things, how unfrequently soever she did aught, which she would willingly have recalled afterwards; not, indeed, that she ever said anything unkind or wrong in itself, and rarely anything that could give pain to another, unless that pain were richly merited indeed—but that she gradually came to learn, long before she learned to restrain her impulses, that it may be very often unwise to speak what in itself is wise—and very often, if not wrong, yet certainly imprudent and of evil consequences to give loud utterance even to right opinions.

Such were the persons, such the dispositions of the fair heiresses of Ingleborough, at the time when they had attained the ages I have specified, and certainly, although their sphere of usefulness would have appeared at first sight circumscribed, and the range of their enjoyments very narrow, there rarely have been seen two happier or more useful beings than Annabel and Marian Hawkwood, in this wide world of sin and sorrow.

The care of their bereaved and hapless parent occupied, it is true, the greater portion of their time, yet they found many leisure hours to devote to visiting the poor, aiding the wants of the needy, consoling the sorrows of those who mourned, and sympathizing with the pleasures of the happy among their humble neighbors. To them this might be truly termed a work of love and pleasure, for it is questionable whether from any other source the lovely girls derived a higher or more satisfactory enjoyment, than from their tours of charity among their village pensioners. Next in the scale of happiness stood, doubtless, the society of the old vicar of that pastoral parish, a man who had been their father’s friend and counsellor in those young days of college friendship, when the fresh heart is uppermost in all, and selfishness a dormant passion; a man old enough almost to have been their grandsire, but with a heart as young and cheery as a boy’s—an intellect accomplished in the deepest lore of the schools, both classical and scientific, and skilled thoroughly in all the niceties and graces of French, and Spanish, and Italian literature. A man who had known courts, and camps too, for a short space in his youth; who had seen much, and suffered much, and yet enjoyed not a little, in his acquaintance with the world; and who, from sights, and sufferings, and enjoyments, had learned that if there is much evil, there is yet more of good even in this world—had learned, while rigid to his own, to be most lenient to his neighbor’s failings—had learned that charity should be the fruit of wisdom!—and had learned all this only to practise it in all his daily walks, to inculcate it in all his weekly lessons. This aged man, and his scarce less aged wife, living scarcely a stone’s throw from the Hall, had grown almost to think themselves a portion of the family; and surely no blood kindred could have created stronger ties of kindness than had the familiarity of long acquaintance, the confidence of old hereditary love. Lower yet in the round of their enjoyments, but still a constant source of blameless satisfaction, were their books, their music, their drawings, the management of their household, the cultivation of their lovely garden, the ministering to the wants of their loved birds and flowers. Thus, all sequestered and secluded from the world, placed in the midst of onerous duties and solicitudes almost innumerable, though they had never danced at a ball, nor blushed at the praises of their own beauty flowing from eloquent lips, nor listened to a lover’s suit, queens might have envied the felicity, the calm, pure, peaceful happiness of Annabel and Marian.

They were, indeed, too happy! I do not mean too happy to be virtuous, too happy to be mindful of, and grateful to, the Giver of all joy—but, as the common phrase runs, too happy for their happiness to be enduring. That is a strange belief—a wondrous superstition!—and yet it has been common to all ages. The Greeks, those wild poetic dreamers, imagined that their vain gods, made up of mortal attributes, envied the bliss of men, fearing that wretched earthlings should vie in happiness with the possessors of Olympus. They sang in their dark mystic choruses,

“That perfect bliss of men not childless dies,

But, ended, leaves a progeny behind

Of woes, that spring from fairest fortune blind⁠—”

and, though their other doctrines of that insuperable destiny, that absolute necessity, to resist which is needless labor; and of ancestral guilt, still reproducing guilt through countless generations, would seem to militate against it, there was no more established faith, and no more prevalent opinion, than that unwonted fortunes were necessarily followed by most unusual wo—hence, perhaps, the stern self-mortification of the middle ages—hence, certainly, the vulgar terror, prevalent more or less among all classes, and in every time and country, that children are too beautiful, too prematurely wise, too good, to be long-lived—that happiness is too great to be lasting—that mornings are too fine to augur stormless days! And we—aye! we ourselves—we of a better and purer dispensation—we half believe all this, and more than half tremble at it, although in truth there is no cause for fear in the belief—since, if there be aught of truth in the mysterious creed, which facts do in a certain sense seem to bear out, we can but think, we cannot but perceive, that this is but a varied form of care and mercy vouchsafed by the Great All-perfect, towards his frail creatures—that this is but a merciful provision to hinder us from laying up for ourselves “treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal”—a provision to restrain us from forgetting, in the small temporary bliss of the present, the boundless and incomparable beatitude of the future—to warn us against bartering, like Esau, our birthright for a mess of pottage.

But I am not now called to follow out this train of thought, suggested by the change in the fortunes of those to whom I am performing the part of historian—by the change I say in their fortunes—a change arising, too, from the very circumstances, as is so frequently the case, which seemed to promise the most fairly for their improvement and their permanence—oh, how blind guides are we—even the most far-sighted of us all—how weak and senseless judges, even the most sagacious—how false and erring prophets, even the wisest and the best!⁠—

But I must not anticipate, nor overrun my scent, meriting, like a babbling hound, the harsh thong of the huntsman critic. It was, as I have said already, somewhere in the summer wherefrom Annabel reckoned her twentieth, and Marian her nineteenth year—very late in the last month of summer, an hour or two before the sunset of as beautiful an evening as ever smiled upon the face of the green earth; the sky was nearly cloudless, though a thin gauze-like haze had floated up from the horizon, and so far veiled the orb of the great sun, that the eye could gaze undazzled on his glories; and the whole air was full of a rich golden light which flooded all the level meadows with its lustre,—except where they were checkered by the long cool blue shadows, projected from the massive clumps of noble forest trees, which singly or in groups diversified the lovely vale—and gilded the tall slender steeple of the old village church, and glanced in living fire from the broad oriel windows of the Hall. Such was the evening, and so beautiful the prospect, with every sound and sight in perfect harmony—the sharp squeak of the rapid swifts wheeling their airy circles around the distant spire, the full and liquid melodies of thrush and blackbird from out the thorn bushes upon the lawn, the lowing of the cows returning from their pasture to pay the evening tribute, the very cawing of the homeward rooks blended by distance into a continuous and soothing murmur, the rippling music of the stream, the low sigh of the west wind in the foliage of the sycamores, the far shout of the children happy at their release from school, the carol of a solitary milkmaid, combining to make up music as sweet as can be heard or dreamed of. That lovely picture was surveyed, and that delicious melody was listened to by eyes and ears well fitted to appreciate their loveliness—for at an open casement of a neat parlor in the Hall, with furniture all covered with those elegant appliances of female industry—well-filled drawings, and books, and instruments of music, and work baskets, and frames for embroidery—which show so pleasantly that the apartment is one, not of show, but of calm home enjoyment, sat Annabel, alone—for the presence of the frail paralytic being, who dozed in her arm-chair at the farther end of the room, cannot be held to constitute society. Marian, for the first time in her life, was absent from her home on a visit, which had already endured nearly six weeks, to the only near relative of the family who was yet living—a younger sister of her mother—who had married many years ago a clergyman, whose piety and talents had raised him to a stall in the cathedral church of York, where he resided with his wife—a childless couple. This worthy pair had passed a portion of the summer at the Hall, and, when returning to the metropolis of the county, had prevailed on their younger niece, not altogether without difficulty, to go with them for a few weeks, and see a little of society on a scale something more extended than that which her native vales could offer. It was the first time in their lives that the sisters ever had been parted for more than a few days, and now the hours were beginning to appear very long to Annabel, as weeks were running into months, and the gorgeous suns of summer were fast preparing to give place to the cold dews and frosty winds of autumn. The evening meal was over, and a solitary thing was that meal now, which used to be the most delightful of the day, and hastily did the lonely sister hurry it over, thinking all the while what might be Marian’s occupation at the moment, and whether she too was engaged in thoughts concerning her far friends and the fair home of her childhood. It was then in a mood half melancholy, and half listless, that Annabel was gazing from her window down the broad valley to the eastward, marvelling at the beauty of the scenery, though she had noted every changing hue that flitted over the far purple hills a thousand times before; and listening to every sweet familiar sound, and yet at the same time pondering, as if she were quite unconscious of all that met her senses, about things which, she fancied, might be happening at York, when on a sudden her attention was aroused by a dense cloud of dust rising beyond the river, upon the line of the highroad, and sweeping up the valley with a progress so unusually rapid as indicated that the objects, which it veiled from view, must be in more than commonly quick motion. For a few moments she watched this little marvel narrowly, but without any apprehension or even any solicitude, until, as it drew nearer, she could perceive at times bright flashes as if of polished metal gleaming out through the murky wreaths, and feathers waving in the air. The year was that in which the hapless Charles, all hopes of reconciliation with the parliament being decidedly frustrated, displayed the banner of civil war, and drew the sword against his subjects. The rumors of the coming strife had circulated, like the dread sub-terraneous rumblings which harbinger the earth-quake, through all the country far and near, sad omens of approaching evil; and more distinctly were they bruited throughout Yorkshire, in consequence of the attempt which had been made by the royal party to secure Hull with all its magazines and shipping—frustrated by the energy and spirit of the Hothams—so that, as soon as she perceived that the dust was, beyond all doubt, stirred up by a small party of well appointed horse, Annabel entertained no doubts as to the meaning, but many serious apprehensions as to the cause, of the present visitation. The road by which the cavaliers were proceeding, though well made and passable at all times, was no considerable thoroughfare; no large or important towns lay on its route, nay, no large villages were situated on its margins; it was a devious, winding way, leading to many a homely farm-house, many a small sequestered hamlet, and affording to the good rustics a means of carrying their wheat, and eggs, and butter, or driving their fat cattle and black-faced moorland sheep to market, but it was not the direct line between any two points or places worthy of even a passing notice. It is true, that some twelve or fifteen miles down the valley, there was a house or two tenanted by gentry—one that might, by a liberal courtesy, have been designated as a castle—but above Ingleborough Hall, to the northwestward, there was no manor-house or dwelling of the aristocracy at all, until the road left the ghylls, as those wild glens are designated, and joined the line of the great northern turnpike. It was extremely singular then, to say the least, that a gay troop of riders should appear suddenly in that wild spot, so far from anything that would be likely to attract them; and Annabel sat some time longer by the window, wondering, and at the same time fearing, although, in truth, she scarce knew what, until, at about a mile’s distance, she saw them halt, and, after a few moments’ conversation with a farming man on the wayside, as if to inquire their route, turn suddenly down a narrow by-road leading to the high narrow bridge of many arches which crossed the noble river, and gave the only access to the secluded site of Ingleborough. When she saw this, however, her perturbation became very great; for she well knew that there lay nothing in that direction, except one little market-town, far distant, and a few scattered farm-houses on the verge of the moors, so that there could be little doubt that Ingleborough was indeed their destination. The very moment that she arrived at this conclusion, Annabel called a serving-man and bade him run quick to the vicarage, and pray good Doctor Summers to come up to her instantly, as she was in great strait, and fain would speak with him; and, at the same time, with an energy of character that hardly could have been expected from one so young and delicate, ordered the men of the household, including in those days the fowler and the falconer, and half a dozen sturdy grooms, and many a supernumerary more, whom we in these degenerate times have long discarded as incumbrances, to have their arms in readiness—for every manor-house then had its regular armory—and to prepare the great bell of the Hall to summon all the tenants, on the instant such proceeding might be needful.

In a few moments the good gray-haired vicar came, almost breathless from the haste with which he had crossed the little space between the vicarage and the manor; and a little while after his wife followed him, anxious to learn, as soon as possible, what could have so disturbed the quiet tenor of a mind so regulated by high principles, and garrisoned by holy thoughts, as Annabel’s. Their humble dwelling, though scarce a stone’s throw from the Hall, was screened by a projecting knoll, feathered with dense and shadowy coppice, which hid from it entirely the road by which the horsemen were advancing; so that the worthy couple had not perceived or suspected anything to justify the fears of Annabel, until they were both standing in her presence—then, while the worthy doctor was proffering his poor assistance, and his good wife inquiring eagerly what was amiss, the sight of that gay company of cavaliers, with feathers waving and scarfs fluttering in the wind, and gold embroideries glancing to the sun, as, having left the dusty road, they wheeled through the green meadows, flashed suddenly upon them.

“Who can they be? What possibly can bring them hither?” exclaimed Annabel, pointing with evident trepidation towards the rapidly approaching horsemen; “I fear, oh, I greatly fear some heavy ill is coming—but I have ordered all the men to take their arms, and the great bell will bring us twenty of the tenants in half as many minutes. What can it be, good doctor?”

“In truth I know not, Annabel,” replied the good man, smiling cheerfully as he spoke; “in truth I know not, nor can at all conjecture; but be quite sure of this, dear girl, that they will do, to us at least, no evil—they are King Charles’ men beyond doubt, churchmen and cavaliers, all of them—any one can see that; and though I know not that we have much to fear from either party, from them at least we have no earthly cause for apprehension. I will go forth, however, to meet them, and to learn their errand—meantime, fear nothing.”

“Oh! you mistake me,” she answered at once; “oh! you mistake me very much, for I did not, even for a moment, fear personally anything; it was for my poor mother I was first alarmed, and all our good, kind neighbors, and, indeed, all the country around, that shows so beautiful and happy this fair evening—oh! but this civil war is a dread thing, and dread, I fear, will be the reckoning of those who wake it⁠—”

“Who wake it without cause, my daughter! A dreadful thing it is at all times, but it may be a necessary, aye! and a holy thing—when freedom or religion are at stake—but we will speak of this again; for see, they have already reached the farther gate, and I must speak with them before they enter here, let them be who they may;” and with the words, pressing her hand with fatherly affection, “Farewell,” he said, “be of good cheer, I purpose to return forthwith,” then left the room, and hurrying down the steps of the porch, walked far more rapidly than seemed to suit his advanced years and sedentary habits across the park to meet the gallant company.

A gallant company, indeed, it was, and such as was but rarely seen in that wild region, being the train of a young gentleman of some eight or nine and twenty years, splendidly mounted, and dressed in the magnificent fashion of those days, in a half military costume, for his buff coat was lined throughout with rich white satin, and fringed and looped with silver, a falling collar of rich Flanders lace flowing down over his steel gorget, and a broad scarf of blue silk supporting his long silver-hilted rapier—by his side rode another person, not certainly a menial servant, and yet clearly not a gentleman of birth and lineage; and after these a dozen or more of armed attendants, all wearing the blue scarf and black feathers of the royalists, all nobly mounted and accoutred, like regular troopers, with sword and dagger, pistols and musquetoons, although they wore no breastplates, nor any sort of defensive armor. A brace of jet-black greyhounds, without a speck of white upon their sleek and glistening hides, ran bounding merrily beside their master’s stirrup, and a magnificent gosshawk sat hooded on his wrist, with silver bells and richly decorated jesses. So much had the ladies observed, even before the old man reached the party; but when he did so, pausing for a moment to address the leader, that gentleman at once leaped down from his horse, giving the rein to a servant, and accompanied him, engaged apparently in eager conversation, toward the entrance of the Hall. This went far on the instant to restore confidence to Annabel; but when they came so near that their faces could be seen distinctly from the windows, and she could mark a well-pleased smile upon the venerable features of her friend, she was completely reassured. A single glance, moreover, at the face of the stranger showed her that the most timid maiden need hardly feel a moment’s apprehension, even if he were her country’s or her faction’s foe; for it was not merely handsome, striking, and distinguished, but such as indicates, or is supposed to indicate, the presence of a kindly disposition and good heart. Annabel had not much time, indeed, for making observations at that moment, for it was scarce a minute before they had ascended the short flight of steps, which led to the stone porch, and entered the door of the vestibule—a moment longer, and they came into the parlor, the worthy vicar leading the young man by the hand, as if he were a friend of ten years’ standing.

“Annabel,” he exclaimed, in a joyous voice, as he crossed the threshold of the room, “this is the young Lord Vaux, son of your honored father’s warmest and oldest friend; and in years long gone by, but unforgotten, my kindest patron. He has come hither, bearing letters from his father—knowing not until now that you, my child, were so long since bereaved—letters of commendation, praying the hospitality of Ingleborough, and the best influence of the name of Hawkwood, to levy men to serve King Charles in the approaching war. I have already told him⁠—”

“How glad, how welcome, doubtless, would have been his coming,” answered Annabel, advancing easily to meet the youthful nobleman, although a deep blush covered all her pale features as she performed her unaccustomed duty, “had my dear father been alive, or my poor mother”—casting a rapid glance towards the invalid—“been in health to greet him. As it is,” she continued, “the Lord Vaux, I doubt not, in the least, will pardon any imperfections in our hospitality, believing that if in aught we err, it will be error, not of friendliness or of feeling, but of experience only, seeing I am but a young mistress of a household. You, my kind friend, and Mistress Summers, will doubtless tarry with us while my Lord Vaux gives us the favor of his presence.”

“Loath should I be, indeed, dear lady, thus to intrude upon your sorrows, could I at all avoid it,” replied the cavalier; “and charming as it must needs be to enjoy the hospitalities tendered by such an one as you, I do assure you, were I myself concerned alone, I would remount my horse at once, and ride away, rather than force myself upon your courtesy. But, when I tell you that my father’s strong opinion holds it a matter of importance—importance almost vital to the king, and to the cause of Church and State in England—that I should levy some force here of cavaliers, where there be so few heads of noble houses living, to act in union with Sir Philip Musgrave, in the north, and with Sir Marmaduke Langdale, I both trust and believe that you will overlook the trouble and intrusion, in fair consideration of the motives which impel me.”

“Pray—” said she, smiling gaily—“pray, my Lord Vaux, let us leave, now, apology and compliment—most unaffectedly and truly I am glad to receive you, both as the son of my father’s valued friend, and as a faithful servant of our most gracious king—we will do our best, too, to entertain you; and Doctor Summers will aid you with his counsel and experience in furthering your military levies. How left you the good earl, your father? I have heard mine speak of him many times, and ever in the highest terms of praise, when I was but a little girl—and my poor mother much more recently, before this sad calamity affected her so fearfully.”

Her answer, as it was intended, had the effect at once of putting an end to all formality, and setting the young nobleman completely at his ease; the conversation took a general tone, and was maintained on all sides with sufficient spirit, until, when Annabel retired for a little space to conduct her mother to her chamber, De Vaux found himself wondering how a mere country girl, who had lived a life so secluded and domestic, should have acquired graces both of mind and manner, such as he never had discovered in court ladies; while she was struck even in a greater degree by the frank, unaffected bearing, the gay wit, and sparkling anecdote, blended with many a touch of deeper feeling, which characterized the youthful nobleman. After a little while she reappeared, and with her was announced the evening meal, the pleasant sociable old-fashioned supper, and as he sat beside her, while she presided, full of calm modest self-possession, at the head of her hospitable board, with no one to encourage her, or lend her countenance, except the good old vicar and his homely helpmate, he could not but draw fresh comparisons, all in her favor too, betwixt the quiet graceful confidence of the ingenuous girl before him, and the minauderies and meretricious airs of the court dames, who had been hitherto the objects of his passing admiration. Cheerfully, then, and pleasantly the evening passed away; and when upon her little couch, hard by the invalid’s sick bed, Annabel thought over the events of the past day, she felt concerning young De Vaux, rather as if he had been an old familiar friend, with whom she had renewed an intercourse long interrupted, than as of a mere acquaintance whom that day first had introduced, and whom the next might possibly remove forever. Something there was, when they met next, at breakfast on the following morning, of blushing bashfulness in Annabel which he had not observed, nor she before experienced; but it passed rapidly away, and left her self-possessed and tranquil—while surely in the sparkling eye, the eager haste with which he broke away from his conversation with Dr. Summers, as she entered, in his hand half extended, and then half awkwardly, half timidly, withdrawn, there was much indication of excited feeling, widely at variance with the stiff and even formal mannerism inculcated and practised in the court of the unhappy Charles. It needs not now, however, to dwell on passing conversations, to narrate every trifling incident—the morning meal once finished, De Vaux mounted his horse, and rode forth in accordance with the directions of the loyal clergyman, to visit such among the neighboring farmers as were most likely to be able to assist him in the levying a horse regiment. A few hours passed, and he returned full of high spirits and hot confidence—he had met everywhere assurances of good will to the royal cause, had succeeded in enlisting some ten or more of stout and hardy youths, and had no doubt of finally accomplishing the object, which he had in view, to the full height of his aspirations. After dinner, which in those primitive days was served at noon, he was engaged for a time in making up despatches for his father, which having been sent off by a messenger of his own trusty servants to the castle in Northumberland, he went out and joined his lovely hostess in the sheltered garden, which I have described above; and there they lingered until the sun was sinking in the west behind the huge and purple headed hills, which covered the horizon in that direction—the evening circle and the social meal succeeded, and when they parted for the night, if Annabel and young De Vaux could not be said to be enamored, as indeed they could not yet, they had at least made so much progress to that end, that each esteemed the other the most agreeable and charming person it had been hitherto their fortune to encounter; and, although this was decidedly the farthest point to which the thoughts of Annabel extended, when he had laid down on his bed, with the sweet rays of the harvest moon flooding his room with quiet lustre, and the voice of the murmuring rivulet and the low flutter of the west wind in the giant sycamores blending themselves into a soft and soothing melody, the young lord found himself considering how gracefully that fair pale girl would fill the place, which had been long left vacant by his mother, in the grand Hall of Gilsland Castle. Another, and another day succeeded—a week slipped away—a second and third followed it, and still the ranks of the royal regiment, though they were filling rapidly, had many vacancies, and arms had yet to be provided, and standards, and musicians—passengers went and came continually between the castle and the manor; and all was bustle and confusion in the lone glens of Wharfdale. Meantime a change was wrought in Annabel’s demeanor, that all who saw remarked—there was a brighter glow than ever had been seen before in her transparent cheeks; her eyes sparkled almost as brilliantly as Marian’s; her lips were frequently arrayed in bright and beaming smiles; her step was light and springy as a young fawn’s upon the mountain—Annabel was in love, and had discovered that it was so—Annabel was beloved, and knew it—the young lord’s declaration and the old earl’s consent had come together, and the sweet maiden’s heart was given, and her hand promised, almost before the asking. Joy! joy! was there not joy in Ingleborough? The good old vicar’s tranquil air of satisfaction, the loud and eloquent mirth of his kind-hearted housewife—the merry gay congratulations of wild Marian, who wrote from York, half crazy with excitement and delight—the evident and lovely happiness of the young promised bride—what pen of man may even aspire to describe them. All was decided—all arranged—the marriage was, so far at least, to be held private, that no festivities nor public merriment should bruit it to the world, until the civil strife should be decided, and the king’s power established; which all men fancied at that day it would by a single battle—and which, had Rupert wheeled upon the flank of Essex at Edge-Hill, instead of chasing the discomfited and flying horse of the Roundheads miles from the field of battle, would probably have been the case. The old earl had sent the wedding gifts to his son’s chosen bride, had promised to be present at the nuptials, the day of which was fixed already; but it had been decided, that when De Vaux should be forced to join the royal armies, his young wife should continue to reside at Ingleborough, with her bereaved mother and fond sister, until the wished-for peace should unite England once again in bonds of general amity, and the bridegroom find honorable leisure to lead his wife in state to his paternal mansions. Days sped away! how fast they seemed to fly to those young happy lovers! How was the very hour of their first interview noted, and marked with the white in the deep tablets of their minds—how did they, shyly half, half fondly, recount each to the other the first impressions of their growing fondness—how did they bless the cause that brought them thus together—Proh! cæca mens mortalium!—oh! the short-sighted scope of mortal vision!—alas! for one—for both!⁠—

The wedding day was fixed, and now was fast approaching; and hourly was Marian with the good uncle and his dame expected at the Hall, and wished for, and discoursed of by the lovers—“and oh!—” would Annabel say, half sportively and half in earnest—“well was it for my happiness, De Vaux, that she was absent when you first came hither, for had you seen her first, her far superior beauty, her bright wild radiant face, her rare arch naïveté, her flashing wit, and beautiful enthusiasm, would—must have captivated you all at once—and what had then become of your poor Annabel?”

And then would the young lord vow—and vow in all sincerity and truth as he believed, that had he met her first in the most glorious courts of Europe, with all the gorgeous beauties of the world to rival her, she would alone have been the choice of his soul—his soul first touched by her of women!—And then he would ask in lowered tones, and with a sly simplicity of manner, whether if he had loved another, she could have still loved him; to which with all the frank and fearless purity, which was so beautiful a trait in Annabel—“Oh! yes—” she would reply, and gaze with calm reliance, as she did so, into her lover’s eyes—“oh yes, dear Ernest—and then how miserably wretched must I have been, through my whole life thereafter. Oh! yes, I loved you—though then I knew it not, nor indeed thought at all about it until you spoke to me—I loved you dearly—tenderly!—and I believe it would have almost killed me, to look upon you afterward as the wife of another.”

The wedding day was but a fortnight distant, and strange to say, it was the very day two months gone, which had seen their meeting. Wains had arrived from Gilsland, loaded with arms and uniforms, standards and ammunition—two of the brothers of De Vaux, young gallant cavaliers, had come partly to officer the men, partly to do fit honor to their brother’s nuptials. The day, although the season had now advanced far into brown October, was sunny, mild and beautiful; the regiment had that day, for the first time, mustered in arms in Ingleborough park, and a gay show they made with glittering casques and corslets, fresh from the armorer’s anvil, and fluttering scarfs and dancing plumes, and bright emblazoned banners.

The sun was in the act of setting—De Vaux and Annabel were watching his decline from the same window in the Hall, whence she had first discovered his unexpected coming; when, as on that all eventful evening, a little dust was seen arising on the high road beyond the river, and in a moment a small mounted party, among which might be readily descried the fluttering of female garments!

“It is my sister—” exclaimed Annabel, jumping up on the instant, and clasping her hands eagerly—“it is my dear, dear sister—come, Ernest, come; let us go meet dear Marian.” No time was lost; but arm in arm they sallied forth, the lovers; and met the little train just this side the park gates.

Marian sprang from her horse, light as a spirit of the air, and rushed into her sister’s arms and clung there with a long and lingering embrace, and as she raised her head a bright tear glittered on either silky eyelash. De Vaux advanced to greet her, but as he did so, earnestly perusing the lineaments of his fair sister, he was most obviously embarrassed, his manner was confused and even agitated, his words faltered—and she whose face had been, a second before, beaming with the bright crimson of excitement, whose eye had looked round eagerly and gladly to mark the chosen of her sister—she turned as pale as ashes—brow, cheeks, and lips—pale, almost livid!—and her eye fell abashed, and did not rise again till he had finished speaking. None noticed it, but Annabel; for all the party were engaged in gay congratulations, and, they recovering themselves immediately, nothing more passed that could create surmise—but she did note it, and her heart sank for a moment; and all that evening she was unusually grave and silent; and had not her usual demeanor been so exceedingly calm and subdued, her strange dejection must have been seen and wondered at by her assembled kinsfolk.

A DIRGE.

———

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

———

Poet! lonely is thy bed,

And the turf is overhead—

Cold earth is thy cover;

But thy heart hath found release,

And it slumbers full of peace

’Neath the rustle of green trees

And the warm hum of the bees,

’Mid the drowsy clover;

Through thy chamber, still as death,

A smooth gurgle wandereth,

As the blue stream murmureth

To the blue sky over.

Three paces from the silver strand,

Gently in the fine, white sand,

With a lily in thy hand,

Pale as snow, they laid thee;

In no coarse earth wast thou hid,

And no gloomy coffin-lid

Darkly overweighed thee.

Silently as snow-flakes drift,

The smooth sand did sift and sift

O’er the bed they made thee;

All sweet birds did come and sing

At thy sunny burying—

Choristers unbidden,

And, beloved of sun and dew.

Meek forget-me-nots upgrew

Where thine eyes so large and blue

’Neath the turf were hidden.

Where thy stainless clay doth lie,

Blue and open is the sky,

And the white clouds wander by,

Dreams of summer silently

Darkening the river;

Thou hearest the clear water run,

And the ripples every one,

Scattering the golden sun,

Through thy silence quiver;

Vines trail down upon the stream,

Into its smooth and glassy dream

A green stillness spreading,

And the shiner, perch and bream

Through the shadowed waters gleam

’Gainst the current heading.

White as snow, thy winding sheet

Shelters thee from head to feet,

Save thy pale face only;

Thy face is turned toward the skies,

The lids lie meekly o’er thine eyes,

And the low-voiced pine-tree sighs

O’er thy bed so lonely.

All thy life thou lov’dst its shade:

Underneath it thou art laid,

In an endless shelter;

Thou hearest it forever sigh

As the wind’s vague longings die

In its branches dim and high—

Thou hear’st the waters gliding by

Slumberously welter.

Thou wast full of love and truth,

Of forgivingness and ruth—

Thy great heart with hope and youth

Tided to o’erflowing.

Thou didst dwell in mysteries,

And there lingered on thine eyes

Shadows of serener skies,

Awfully wild memories,

That were like foreknowing;

Through the earth thou would’st have gone,

Lighted from within alone,

Seeds from flowers in Heaven grown

With a free hand sowing.

Thou didst remember well and long

Some fragments of thine angel-song,

And strive, through want and wo and wrong

To win the world unto it;

Thy sin it was to see and hear

Beyond To-day’s dim hemisphere⁠—

Beyond all mists of hope and fear,

Into a life more true and clear,

And dearly thou didst rue it;

Light of the new world thou hadst won,

O’er flooded by a purer sun—

Slowly Fate’s ship came drifting on,

And through the dark, save thou, not one

Caught of the land a token.

Thou stood’st upon the farthest prow,

Something within thy soul said “Now!”

And leaping forth with eager brow,

Thou fell’st on shore heart-broken.

Long time thy brethren stood in fear;

Only the breakers far and near,

White with their anger, they could hear;

The sounds of land, which thy quick ear

Caught long ago, they heard not.

And, when at last they reached the strand,

They found thee lying on the sand

With some wild flowers in thy hand,

But thy cold bosom stirred not;

They listened, but they heard no sound

Save from the glad life all around

A low, contented murmur.

The long grass flowed adown the hill,

A hum rose from a hidden rill,

But thy glad heart, that knew no ill

But too much love, lay dead and still⁠—

The only thing that sent a chill

Into the heart of summer.

Thou didst not seek the poet’s wreath

But too soon didst win it;

Without ’twas green, but underneath

Were scorn and loneliness and death,

Gnawing the brain with burning teeth,

And making mock within it.

Thou, who wast full of nobleness,

Whose very life-blood ’twas to bless,

Whose soul’s one law was giving,

Must bandy words with wickedness,

Haggle with hunger and distress,

To win that death which worldliness

Calls bitterly a living.

“Thou sow’st no gold, and shall not reap!”

Muttered earth, turning in her sleep;

“Come home to the Eternal Deep!”

Murmured a voice, and a wide sweep

Of wings through thy soul’s hush did creep,

As of thy doom o’erflying;

It seem’d that thy strong heart would leap

Out of thy breast, and thou didst weep,

But not with fear of dying;

Men could not fathom thy deep fears,

They could not understand thy tears,

The hoarded agony of years

Of bitter self-denying.

So once, when high above the spheres

Thy spirit sought its starry peers,

It came not back to face the jeers

Of brothers who denied it;

Star-crowned, thou dost possess the deeps

Of God, and thy white body sleeps

Where the lone pine forever keeps

Patient watch beside it.

Poet! underneath the turf,

Soft thou sleepest, free from morrow,

Thou hast struggled through the surf

Of wild thoughts and want and sorrow.

Now, beneath the moaning pine,

Full of rest, thy body lieth,

While far up in clear sunshine,

Underneath a sky divine,

Her loosed wings thy spirit trieth;

Oft she strove to spread them here,

But they were too white and clear

For our dingy atmosphere.

Thy body findeth ample room

In its still and grassy tomb

By the silent river;

But thy spirit found the earth

Narrow for the mighty birth

Which it dreamed of ever;

Thou wast guilty of a rhyme

Learned in a benigner clime,

And of that more grievous crime,

An ideal too sublime

For the low-hung sky of Time.

The calm spot where thy body lies

Gladdens thy soul in Paradise,

It is so still and holy;

Thy body sleeps serenely there,

And well for it thy soul may care,

It was so beautiful and fair,

Lily white so wholly.

From so pure and sweet a frame

Thy spirit parted as it came,

Gentle as a maiden;

Now it lieth full of rest—

Sods are lighter on its breast

Than the great, prophetic guest

Wherewith it was laden.

SONNET TO MY MOTHER.

———

BY T. HOLLEY CHIVERS, M. D.

———

Before mine eyes had seen the light of day,

Or that my soul had come from Heaven’s great King⁠—

A harmless, tiny, helpless little thing⁠—

You loved me!—While my tender being lay

In the soft rose-leaves of your heart at rest,

Like some lone bird within its downy nest,

Beneath the concave of its mother’s wing,

Unborn—your soul came in my heart to dwell,

Like perfume in the flower, each part to bring,

As warmth unto the young bird in its shell,

And built me up to what I was to be,

A semblance of thyself. Thus, being cast

In thy heart’s mould, I grew up like to thee,

And lost in thee my first friend with my last!

BOSTON RAMBLINGS.

———

BY MISS LESLIE.

———

PART THE FIRST.

Perhaps there is no place in America where the people continued to cling so long, and so fondly, to the relics and traditions of the olden time, as in Boston—their first era being that of the early settlers, their second that of the revolution. At the commencement of my acquaintance with Boston and Bostonians, I was particularly struck with the prevalence of this feeling, having found so little of it in my native city, Philadelphia. Yet I was sorry to hear from my eastern friends, that comparatively it was fast subsiding, and that a fancy for modern improvements (blended with the powerful incentive of pecuniary interest) was rapidly superseding that veneration so long cherished for the places and things connected with the history of their “ancient and honorable town,” and the founders of their country’s freedom. On my second visit to Boston I missed much that on my first I had found still undesecrated. On my third, but few vestiges remained of the poetry, the romance, and the quaintness that, with regard to external objects, had so interested and amused me in the year 1832. I looked in vain for the “old familiar faces” of certain antiquated and, perhaps, unsightly structures that I had delighted to contemplate as the time-honored habitations of men with undying names. They were gone, and new and more profitable buildings erected on their site. In many of these instances “I could have better spared a better house.”

Fortunately the charter of the city specifies that Faneuil Hall is never to be sold, nor can the ground on which it stands be appropriated to any other purpose. Except that the market-place in the lower story is now occupied by shops, the whole edifice still remains nearly as it was when the walls of its chief apartment resounded with the acclamations of the people who discussed, at their town meetings, those principles that led to their self-emancipation from the sway of Britain. Acclamations elicited by the bold and overpowering eloquence of James Otis, the enthusiastic outbreakings of the impetuous spirit of Warren, the pure and self-sacrificing patriotism of Quincy, and the calm but energetic plain sense of Samuel Adams, backed by the generous liberality of that wealthy and noble-minded merchant whose name, as president of the first Congress, leads on the glorious array of signatures appended to the Declaration of Independence. Did no one think of preserving the pen with which those names were written?—the sacred quill

“That wing’d the arrow, sure as fate,

Which ascertain’d the rights of man.”

The full-length portrait of Peter Faneuil stands at the upper end of the hall, looking like its guardian spirit. It is a fine copy of a small original that was painted in his lifetime. In regarding the likeness of a person of note (provided always that the painter is a good artist) you can generally judge of its verisimilitude, by its representing the features of the mind in conjunction with those of the face. If a well painted portrait has no particular expression, you may safely conclude that the sitter had no particular character. When, at the first glance of a picture, you are struck with the conviction that the original must have looked exactly so, it is because you at once perceive his mind in his face. Who that has ever seen it, while it hung so long in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, does not recollect Berthon’s admirable and life-like portrait of Buonaparte in the first year of that consulate. Every beholder was struck with an irresistible conviction of its perfect and unimpeachable fidelity of character. There, in his gold embroidered blue coat, his tri-colored sash, and his buff-leather gauntlets, was the pale, thin, almost cadaverous young soldier, just returned from the unwholesome regions of the Nile; with his dark, uncared-for hair shading his thoughtful brow, and his deep-set, intense eyes, that looked as if they could search into the soul of every man they saw. So self-evident was the truth of this picture, that it was unnecessary to be aware of its exact accordance with all the descriptions given at that time of the republican general, who had just made himself the chief magistrate of the French people, and was called only Buonaparte. A few years afterward, when “the hero had sunk into the king,” and was termed Napoleon, and when, in becoming more handsome, his face lost much of its original expression, this picture was equally valuable, as showing how he had looked in the early part of his wondrous career.

Another picture which we feel at once to be a most faithful representation, is Greuze’s portrait of Franklin. It was painted by that excellent artist when the venerable printer, philosopher, author, statesman (what shall we call him) was living in Paris. The dress is a coat and waistcoat of dark reddish silk, trimmed with brown fur. The head is very bald at the top, and he wears his gray locks plain and unpowdered. He has that noble expanse of forehead which is almost always found in persons of extraordinary intellect. His eye is indicative of strong sense and benevolence, enlivened with a keen relish for humor. His whole countenance exhibits that union of genius and common sense, shrewdness and kindness, which formed his character. My father had once in his possession (but lost it by lending) a fine French engraving taken from this very portrait, and printed in colors. He had known Dr. Franklin intimately, and he considered it the most admirable likeness he had ever seen—in fact the very man.

To return to Mr. Faneuil—his portrait also is highly characteristic. No one can look at this picture of a tall, dignified gentleman, in a suit of crimson velvet and gold, a long lace cravat, and a powdered wig, according to the patrician costume of his time, and can view his fine open countenance, without believing the whole to be a correct portraiture of the opulent and public spirited merchant who, while he was yet living, gave its first market-place, with a hall for the accommodation of public meetings, to the town that had afforded an asylum to his Huguenot ancestor. The remains of Peter Faneuil, who died suddenly in 1743, are interred amid the green shades of the Granary Burying Ground, so called from the town granary having been in its immediate vicinity. This cemetery is close to the Tremont Hotel, and in view of another “ancient place of graves,” belonging to the King’s Chapel, which was founded in 1688, and, in early times, numbered among its congregation the largest portion of the Boston aristocracy; and many of their descendants still worship there. It is built of light brown stone, and is frequently called the Stone Chapel.

The length, thickness, and luxuriance of the grass, (which appears to require perpetual mowing,) and the closeness of the burial mounds, which seem almost piled upon each other, make it somewhat difficult to explore the monumental memorials of the old Boston families, whose first progenitors are slumbering beneath. A large number of these tombs are sculptured with armorial bearings, as an evidence that their mouldering occupants belonged, in their fatherland, to “gentle blood.” Of the tomb-stones dated after the revolution, I saw few that bore any indications of “the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power.” The founder of Boston, John Winthrop, is interred in the northwest corner of this cemetery, with his daughter, Grace Sears, (from whom the present Sears family is descended,) and his son, Waitstill Winthrop. The mansion of Governor Winthrop was a large two-story frame house, surrounded by a garden, and shaded with aboriginal trees that had been left standing for the purpose. Its location was near the old South Church, just below School street. Its site is now covered with stores; the block of buildings being termed South Row. I have seen an old portrait of this chief of the Boston colonists. It represents him as a tall, thin, dark-complexioned man, with an oval face, regular features, and a very serious countenance. He is habited in “a sad colored suit,” with a white lawn ruff round his neck, and a black cap on his head. In this burial ground Cooper has placed the vault of the Lechmere family, at the entrance of which the mother of Job Pray was found dead; and from the gallery of the stone chapel the half maniac father of Lionel Lincoln interrupted the marriage of his son with Cecil Dynevor, as they stood at the altar. Though reason may reject the interesting associations that emanate from fiction, feeling and fancy always unconsciously adopt them. It is this which conducts so many travellers to the shores of Loch Katrine, and sends them in a boat to the island of Ellen Douglas, though well aware that the damsel of the lake never in reality existed. I knew a gentleman who traversed the wilds of Connaught to visit the sea-beaten castle of Inismore, because it had been the fancied abode of Glorvina, the Wild Irish Girl, another charming creation of genius. And few will wonder at his doing so, who are familiar with the work that caused the flood-tide of Miss Owenson’s fortune, and who have, of course, read and re-read that beautiful letter in which Horatio describes his first acquaintance with the castle and its inmates.

I was yet a stranger in Boston, when a few days after my arrival I accompanied a lady and gentleman who were residents in that city, (and excellent ciceroni) on an exploring walk into what is called the North End. This is a very old part of the town, extending northerly from Court street to Lynn street, and bounded on its eastern side by the waters of the harbor, and on the west by those of the estuary denominated Charles River. Its extreme point is immediately opposite to Bunker Hill. As it did not modernize as fast as the other sections of Boston, and as its old buildings were longer in getting demolished or furbished up, the habitans of the North End lay under the imputation of being an old fashioned people, sadly deficient in the organ of go-a-headness, and pitifully submitting to creep on all fours, while the rest of the community were making unto themselves wings. There was even a scandalous story circulated of one of their pastors, (a good old gentleman, whose nasal elocution had not improved by age,) uttering in his prayer the words, “Have mercy upon us miserable offenders,” in a manner that sounded very much like, “Have mercy upon us miserable North-enders.”

To give me an idea of the habitations of the early Bostonians, I was purposely taken through some of the oldest and crookedest streets; several of which had pavements so narrow that we had to break rank and to proceed Indian file; for when we attempted to walk abreast and the wall was politely ceded to me, the other lady took the curb-stone, and the gentleman the gutter. Be it known, however, that a Boston gutter is merely a minor ravine, edged with wild flowers; and not a reservoir of liquid mud or a conduit for dirty water; all the conduits in that city being sub-terraneous, and entirely out of sight.

We saw very old houses, some of time-discolored brick, and some of wood in many instances unpainted, and therefore nearly black; in a few, the second story projected far over the first. Many of the ancient frame habitations were very large, and must have been built by people “that were well to do in the world.” In some, the clap-boards were ornamentally scolloped; and in many, the window frames instead of being inserted in the wall, were put on outside, and looked as if ready to burst forth upon us. There were primitive porches with seats in them, sheltered by moss-grown pent-houses, some of which would have furnished a tolerable crop of that roof-loving plant the house-leek. There were wooden balconies, with close heavy balustrades, of the pattern that looks like a range of innumerable narrow jugs. In some houses, the balconies were gone, but the door-windows belonging to them, were still there all the same; and as they now opened upon nothing, they looked most dangerous, especially for children or somnambulists to walk out at. There were street-doors cut horizontally in half, with steps descending inside instead of ascending outside. Many of the houses that stood alone had no front entrance, but ingress and egress were obtained through a small unpretending door in the side. This seemed to be a good plan, when the front was facing the chill blasts of the northeast. It is very disagreeable to have your street door blown open by the violence of the wind.

In an early stage of “our winding way,” we came to the junction of Union and Marshall streets, and there I saw a large square block of dark brown stone, on one side of which was painted in white letters the words “Boston Stone.” Supposing it to be one of the landmarks of the city, and something memorable, I seated myself for a few moments upon it. I was told by one of my companions, that this stone had been an object of great controversy among certain antiquaries of the city. In newspapers a century old there were advertisements of shopkeepers and mechanics, who, in giving their locations, made assurance doubly sure, by stating that they lived near the Boston Stone. Houses were announced for sale or hire in the neighborhood of the Boston Stone. Street-fights and dreadful accidents happened not far from the Boston Stone. What then was the Boston Stone? How came it there, and for what purpose? There was no mention of it in history. Patriotic picturesque people thought it was the foundation-stone of a flag staff or a beacon-mast; and it is certain that the top or upper surface of the block exhibited a slight circular cavity, evidently made on purpose for something: though practical people contended that the hollow was not deep enough to hold anything. I cherished for two or three months the persuasion that the Boston Stone was either a remarkable relic connected with great events, or else that it had been placed there when the peninsula was first laid out for a town, as a mark to designate where some place left off, and another place began; or perhaps to denote the very centre of the settlement. But “the shadows, clouds and darkness” that rested upon all my conjectures, were very prosaically dispelled just before my departure from Boston, by a most unexciting account obtained through the medium of a grandson of “the oldest inhabitant” of that neighborhood. The real solution of the mystery was so very natural, that none but very commonplace people would believe it. It simply implied that a certain apothecary of the olden time being in want of a very large mortar, and unable to obtain one ready made, procured this block of stone and set his boys to hollowing it out for the purpose. They made a beginning, but soon found that the stone was too hard and the labor too great; and having taken a spite at the obdurate block, they shoved it out of doors and left it on the pavement in front of the shop. From hence no one took the trouble to remove it, and finding that the neighbors began to date from its vicinity, the apothecary’s boys made it more distingué by inscribing it with the title of the Boston Stone—How a plain tale will put us down.

Shortly after quitting the Boston Stone, we came to a house at the corner of Union and Hanover streets, which was shown to me as the one in which Dr. Franklin was born. It is of two stories, and built partly of brick and partly of wood. The lower part was now occupied by a little shop, with a blue bell as a sign. Adjoining it in Hanover street was a dark low grocery store into which you descended by a step. It looked exactly as if it had been the soap and candle shop of Josiah Franklin. It was easy to imagine poor Ben. serving customers behind the old counter; cutting candle-wicks into lengths; and snatching, at intervals, a few minutes to read a little in hidden books when nobody saw him. An aged and excellent woman, who had passed her life in this part of the town, told me at a subsequent period, that she well remembered, when a little girl, seeing the old corner house (the dwelling part of the establishment,) pulled down, and the present one erected in its stead. The original corner house had always been regarded as one of the habitations of the Franklin family, and the adjoining old one-story shop (now the grocery) as theirs. It seems to me highly probable that the elder Franklin did live in Milk street (as is generally believed) at the time his son Benjamin was born, and that the infant was wrapped in a blanket and carried over the way to the old South Church to be christened. His baptism is noted in the register of the church, and the date is the same as that of his birth. This speedy performance of the rite of baptism was in accordance with the custom of the times. The Milk street house was a small two-story frame building, and was accidentally burnt in 1810. On the spot has since been erected a three-story furniture warehouse. It is but a few steps from the corner of Washington street, opposite to the Old South. There was an old printing office just back of it; and it is said that Josiah Franklin relinquished the Milk street house to his son James the printer, and removed with his wife and the younger children to Hanover street, and there carried on the soap and candle business, in the dark low one-story shop that is still there: living in the adjoining house at the corner. That the parents of Franklin were residents of the North End at the time of their death there can be no doubt, as they were interred in the North Burying Ground on Copp’s Hill. Many years ago their remains were exhumed, and transferred to the Granary burial place in Tremont street, at the expense of several gentlemen of Boston. A neat monument of granite has been erected upon the mound that covers their ashes; and in the front of the little obelisk is inserted a slab of slate, a part of the original grave stone on Copp’s Hill. This humble medallion bears the names of Josiah Franklin and Abiah his wife, with the date of their deaths. I regarded this monument with much interest, as reflecting back upon his lowly but respectable parents a portion of the honor so universally accorded to the great man their son.

Having diverged from Hanover street to the North Square, we soon found ourselves in front of two very old and remarkable houses; one of which had been the residence of Governor Hutchinson, and the other of William Clarke, a wealthy merchant of the early part of the last century. Both were large old-fashioned buildings, their sides and chimneys overgrown with the scarlet-flowering creeper-vine. Above the front-door of the Hutchinson House, was the wooden balcony from which “Stingy Tommy,” as he was disrespectfully called by the populace, sometimes addressed the restive and stiffnecked people whom it was his hard lot to govern; and by whom he was so much disliked, that whether he did well or ill they were resolved not to be pleased. Perhaps the primary cause of his unpopularity may be traced to his parsimonious habits, or at least to the stories circulated of them. No man that is noted for a mean and avaricious disposition ever was or ever can be liked, either in private life or in a public capacity. However he may attempt to disguise it by an occasional act of liberality, the sordid spirit that is in him will be always creeping out, and exciting disgust and contempt. Yet (as is often the case with such persons) Governor Hutchinson spent much upon show and finery. At the time his house was sacked by the mob (when he narrowly escaped with his life) from this balcony were thrown the splendid brocade gowns and petticoats of his wife, with her laced caps, and numerous ornamental articles of dress and furniture. A bonfire was made of them in the street before the door.

The gentleman who piloted us on this walk through the North End was acquainted with the occupants of the Clarke House, (much the most curious of the two,) therefore we stopped in, and were courteously shown its principal apartments. It was built by Mr. Clarke, in the time of Queen Anne, and was after him occupied by Sir Henry Frankland, and called, for awhile, the Frankland House. It had a large, wide entrance hall, with a parlor on each side. All the ceilings were much too low for the taste of the present times; and a low ceiling always causes a room to look smaller than it really is. The walls of the left hand parlor had been covered with rich tapestry, over which a modern wall-paper was now pasted. A small portion of the papering being peeled off, we saw part of the tapestry beneath. But the other parlor had been evidently the room of state. The floor required no carpet, for it was parqueté all over with small square pieces of American wood, comprising, as we were told, fifty different sorts or specimens; the light-colored pieces forming the ground-work, and the dark ones the figure or pattern. At the first glance it resembled an oil-cloth, or rather (to adopt a very homely comparison) it was not unlike the block-work bed quilts that our grandmothers took such pains in making. On this floor there was a border all round: and in the centre the marquetry represented a large swan with a crown on its head, and a chain round its breast. This was the cognizance of the Clarke family. Those conversant with heraldry know that there is always a reason, either historical, traditionary, or allegorical, for the introduction of certain strange symbols into a coat of arms. We were told that this tesselated floor had cost fifteen hundred dollars. The walls of the room were divided into compartments, edged with rich gilded mouldings; each containing an oil painting, tolerably good, but very vividly colored. The subjects were beyond our comprehension. We did not know whether they were what the drawing-masters call figure-pieces, or whether they were landscapes with figures in them.

In the room over this parlor the chimney-piece was of marble, decorated with a rich and admirably executed carving of flowers, fruit, and Indian corn, beautifully arranged, and descending down the sides as far as the hearth. Above the mantle-piece was a very mediocre picture, in a narrow gilt frame, inserted in the wall. This painting represented a boy and girl, evidently brother and sister. The boy is presenting something that is either a peach or an apple to the girl, who is dressed in a ruffled night-gown and sitting on the side of a couch. The young gentleman is standing upright, habited in a rich suit of blue and gold, ornamented at the wrist with deep cuffs of white lace. On his legs are white silk stockings, ascending above his knees, and buskins laced with gold cord. Neither of the children are looking towards each other, but both are staring out of the picture, and fixing their very large eyes on the spectator.

We were told that Cooper had visited this house previous to commencing Lionel Lincoln. Changing its location to Tremont street, he has described it as the mansion of Mrs. Lechmere.

Few of our American cities have retained their old family domiciles as long as the town of Boston, and they attest the opulence of many of its early inhabitants. However, they are fast disappearing; the large portions of ground that they occupy, surrounded with their gardens and lofty trees, having become too valuable to escape being converted to more profitable purposes. When I first knew Boston, the spacious domain of Gardiner Green extended along Pemberton Hill, far back of Somerset street, including garden, shrubbery, and pasture ground, from whence I was sometimes disturbed at night by the tinkling of a cow-bell, which seemed to me strange in the very heart of a large city. Near it, on Tremont street, stood, with its pilasters and tall windows, the mansion of Jonathan Philips, looking like the residence of an old English nobleman. It had a smooth green lawn in front, and an elevated terrace, which was ascended by a lofty flight of stone steps, bordered with vases of exotics; and among its fine shade trees was the beautiful mountain ash, with its clusters of light scarlet berries. It was built, and originally occupied, by Mr. Faneuil, uncle to the gentleman who bestowed the town-hall on Boston.

Next to the house of Governor Philips stood the residence of the talented and unfortunate Sir Harry Vane, who had come over with the early settlers, and afterwards been appointed governor of the province of Massachusetts. He returned to England during the protectorate of Cromwell; and after the restoration, was committed to the Tower for the republican principles he persisted in advocating. Charles the Second had him tried on a charge of high treason, and he was beheaded on Tower Hill—behaving on the scaffold with the utmost composure and dignity. He attempted to address the people, but the drums and trumpets were sounded to drown his voice. This house of Sir Harry Vane was near two centuries old. It was a large brick building, with a garden at the side. The antique back casements still retained the small diamond-shaped panes set in lead; but, when I saw the house, its front windows looked as if they had been modernized about a century ago.

On my last visit to Boston, about two years since, I found that all the above-mentioned old mansions had been demolished, and their places filled with rows of modern structures suited to the utilitarian spirit of the times. The old Coolidge house, in Bowdoin Square, was still standing in 1840. It also is a large brick building, the bricks much darkened and discolored with time and damp. The house is almost hidden by enormous old trees, which cast their impervious branches so close to the windows that I wondered how its inhabitants could possibly see to do anything, unless they burned lamps or candles all day long. The dense gloominess of shade that environed this mansion, reminded me of the commencement of one of Moore’s earliest poems.

“The darkness that hung upon Willemberg’s walls

Has long been remember’d with grief and dismay,

For years not a sunbeam had play’d in its halls,

And it seem’d as shut out from the regions of day.”

AUTUMN.

———

BY ALBERT PIKE.

———

It is the evening of a pleasant day

In these old woods. The sun profusely flings

His flood of light through every narrow way

That winds around the trees. His spirit clings,

In orange mist, around the snowy wings

Of many a patient cloud, that now, since noon,

Over the western mountains idly swings,

Waiting when night shall come—alas! too soon!

To veil the timid blushes of the virgin moon.

The trees with crimson robes are garmented:

Clad with frail brilliants by the Autumn frost,

For the young leaves, that Spring with beauty fed,

Their greenness and luxuriance have lost,

Gaining new beauty at too dear a cost:

Unnatural beauty, that precedes decay.

Too soon, upon the harsh winds wildly toss’d,

Leaving the naked trees ghost-like and gray,

These leaf-flocks, like vain hopes, will vanish all away.

How does your sad, yet calm and cheerful guise,

Ye melancholy Autumn solitudes,

With my own feelings softly harmonize!

For though I love the hoar and solemn woods,

In all their manifold and changing moods⁠—

In gloom and sunshine, storm and quietness,

By day, or when the dim night on them broods;

Their lightsome glades, their darker mysteries⁠—

Yet the sad heart loves a still, calm scene like this.

Soon will the year like this sweet day have fled,

With swift feet speeding noiselessly and fast,

As a ghost speeds, to join its kindred dead,

In the dark realms of that mysterious vast,

The shadow-peopled and eternal past.

Life’s current deathward flows—a rapid stream,

With clouds and shadows often overcast,

Yet lighted often by a sunny beam

Of happiness, like sweet thoughts in a gloomy dream.

Like the brown leaves, our lov’d ones drop away,

One after one, into the dark abyss