"Bethink you of some other reasonable request, and I will do it for you to the uttermost," answered Frederick ; 66 you know what you have asked is impossible."

"No, no," cried Marli, impatiently; "you shall lay me beside my sister in your own aisle."

"Antonio Marli," returned Frederick solemnly, "must I remind of you your sad sentence?"

"Oho! you mean the dissection-the precious carnival for Dr Pry and his pupils ?" said the Italian, laughing grimly. "But if I can accomplish the half-if I can get quit of the claim of the law in that respect, would you so bury me, my brother?"

"Talk not of this any more," said Hume, not comprehending what the prisoner meant ; "but cry for the purifying mercy of Heaven ere you die."

"You are from the point, Sir," replied Antonio; "but hear me I will leave one request in a letter to you after my death, if you will promise, and swear-nay, merely promise (for I know your honour in all things), to fulfil the same.

“Let me hear it, and judge," said Hume.

"I will not," said the Italian; but yet my request shall be simple, and your accomplishment of it very easy. Moreover, it shall be offensive neither to your country's laws, nor to your own wise mind. Give me this one promise, and I die in peace."

"Be it so then," said Frederick; "I will do your request."

"Then leave me-leave me for ever!" cried Marli. "But if my heart, and my body, and all my soul, could be fashioned into one blessing, they would descend upon thy head and thy heart, and all thy outgoings, thou young man among a million. Oh! my last brother on earth!" So saying, Antonio sprung upon Frederick's neck, and sobbed aloud like a little child; and so overcome was Frederick by the sense of his own unhappiness, but chiefly by pity for the fate of the poor Italian boy, in whose heart generosity was strongly mingled with worse passions, that he gave way to the infectious sorrow; and for many mi

nutes the two young men mingled their tears, as if they had been the children of one mother. At length Marli tore himself away, and flung himself down with his face upon his low bed.

SECTION VIII.

THE very next day word was brought to Frederick Hume, that the Italian had killed himself in prison by striking his head against the walls of his cell; and, at the same time, the following letter was put into Hume's hands :—

"I claim your promise. I forbore distinctly stating to you my purpose last night, because I knew you would tease me with warnings and exhortations, which, with all my respect for you, could no more have stayed me in my antique appropriation of myself, than you could make a rain-proof garment from the torn wings of beautiful butterflies. Did you think my soul could afford to give such a spectacle to gaping boors? Well, we must be buried in the first instance (for the law and the surgeon have lost our limbs) among nettles, in unconsecrated ground, at a respectful distance from Christian bones, in the churchyard of this town. But now for my request, and your vow to fulfil it: I demand that you raise my body by night, and take it to your aisle, and bury it beside Charlotte Marli's beautiful body. This request, I think, implies nothing contrary to the laws of your country, or which can startle a wise heart free from paltry superstitions about the last rites of suicides. Moreover, you can do the thing with great secrecy. Then shall I rest in peace beside her whom my soul loved, and we shall rise together at the Last Day: And you shall be blessed for ever, for her sake and for my sake. Farewell, my brother.

"ANTONIO MARLI."

Hume prepared without delay to obey this letter, and providing himself with six men from the Village, on whose secrecy he could rely, he caused three of them by night to dig up the body of Marli from the grave-yard where it had been buried, whilst the other three, in the meanwhile,

prepared another grave for it in Mrs Mather's aisle, as near as possible to his sister Charlotte's. The complexion of the black tragic night suited well this strange work. Frederick himself superintended the work of exhumation, which was done by the light of dark-lanterns. Happily it was accomplished without interruption. Leaving two of his men carefully to close up the empty grave, Hume, along with the third, accompanied the cart, which took Marli's body, wrapped in a sheet, to the other churchyard. There it was interred anew beside his sister's remains, and the grave being filled up to a precise level, the superfluous earth was carefully removed, so that, without a very narrow inspection, it could not be known that this new burial had taken place. Thus was Antonio Marli's singular request faithfully accomplished.

Next morning Frederick visited the aisle, to see that all was right. The history of the Marlis, and their late living existence, and his own share in their strange destinies, seemed to him all a dream; yet there were their tombs before him, and prostrate in heart from recurring recollections of their fate and his own so deeply intervolved, he remained one last bitter hour beside the graves of these wild and passionate children of the South.

Julia Romelli heard, too late, how she had been imposed upon, in reference to Hume's supposed inconstancy of affection; but, for their mutual peace of mind, she determined never to see him more, and never to exchange explanations with him. As for Frederick, he too had resolved to observe the same forbearance. But, though Julia could be thus self-denied, she was not the less inwardly racked, as she reflected on her own unhappy rashness. Her father's murder was a dreadful aggravation to her distress; and, to make matters still worse, she was harshly treated by her husband, Stewart, who was conscious, probably, that his wife had never loved him. The loss of her first-born boy, who was drowned in a well, brought the terrible consummation. Poor Julia went mad; and night after night (for her brutal husband cared little for her) she might be seen, when the image of the full moon

was shining down in the bottom of the well, sitting on its brink, and inviting the passers-by to come and see her white little boy swimming in the water. From week to week she grew more violent in her insanity, and, after many years of woful alienation, she ended her days in that very cell where Antonio Marli had once lain.

Stricken of heart, and finding no longer any pleasure in the repose of home, Frederick Hume went abroad. Being in France when Napoleon returned from Elba, he crossed the frontier to the Netherlands, joined the British army as a volunteer, and courting death, fell in the Battle of Waterloo.

CHAPTER XVI.

AUTUMN.

AUTUMN, in the usual allegorical picture a fat motherly-looking dame, with a sickle in her right hand, and a wheat sheaf or a horn of Plenty upraised in her left, and mounted on her shoulder like a musket-gives us but a poor representation of the multiform exhilarations of that delightful season. The corn, and the wine, and the oil are so far indicated thereby. But where are the whirring gorcocks, crowing so wildly triumphant; where the deepblooming heather of the mountain side, powdering the sportsman's ankles with rich coloured dust; where the antlered king of the red deer, scornful of the stalker, hanging high and far in the weather-gleam of the North, magnificent, momentary, as he streeks the natural, living, untanned, unsophisticated buckskin of his loins away over a hundred hill-tops in the wild Highlands of Braemar; where the transparent purity and dry healthfulness of the autumnal atmosphere; where the pellucid stream sliding and sleeping away velvet green under the trees, with the little fishes poised in it, as in crystal air; where the fine wires, half revealed in long glimmerings, of the floating gossamer, in the meek sunny day-not so agreeable, however, when they break, invisible but felt, over the bridge of your nose; where the soft streams of pencilled light, lacing divergingly

the glistering clouds of the western afternoon, and falling like a silent kiss on the far ancient pine-wood; where the shoulder of the green distant hill, steeped in the sunny brightness of evening, beautiful as the shoulder of Pelops; where the orange-necked wheat, nodding and shaking before the rustling din of the merry reapers coming on; where the "rantin' kirn;" where the many-coloured beauty of the autumnal woods; where the Harvest Moon?

Poets and poetesses of all kinds, from Charlotte Smith upwards and downwards, have tried their hand at the Harvest Moon; but none of them-not even Homer himself-has reached the perfect glory of that fair ordinance of the night. Pollok has attempted it thus :

"It was an eve of Autumn's holiest mood;

The corn fields, bathed in Cynthia's silver light,
Stood ready for the reaper's gathering hand;
And all the winds slept soundly; nature seemed,
In silent contemplation, to adore

Its Maker: now and then the aged leaf

Fell from its fellows, rustling to the ground;

And, as it fell, bade man think on his end.

On vale and lake, on wood and mountain high,

With pensive wing outspread, sat heavenly thought,
Conversing with itself."

There is considerable breadth of repose in this picture, but it gives us little notion of the Harvest Moon. And why, in the name of all the Unities, did the author add the following as part of the same scene

?

"Vesper looked forth

From out her western hermitage, and smiled;
And up the east unclouded rode the moon

With all her stars, gazing on earth intense,
As if she saw some wonder walking there.

This sacrifices utterly the fine contiguities of time and place; and confuses the first unique picture by adding another, which, if Pollok had even intended continuity, as he evidently does not, should at least have preceded what he gives as the first. Tried by the serene and silent art," no painter could bring them both upon the same canvass. The very word Vesper means to every heart a blue, or rosy, or orange-tawny sky in the west, with a single star. According to the high authority of Milton, in a fine scene in his Paradise Lost, of which this