mestic commenced his duties; and his conduct fully satisfied his master that his choice had been well made, and almost cured the suspicious butler of his dislike. A year passed away, without much worthy of observation, except that the happiness of the owners of the fated house seemed to be crowned by the birth of a son. Three short months after this event, and the dreary day of rebellion and anarchy came round. Most of the families of weight left the country for places of greater security, and Mr. Colthurst's friends advised him to do the same; but he trusted with unbounded confidence in the good will of his servant and neighbours, to whom he had ever proved himself a kind master and a generous friend. His wife added no timid solicitings to the advice of his well-wishers; for she saw he considered it his duty to remain, and be a sort of rallying point to the humble supporters of quiet and good order, whom narrow circumstances compelled to abide, and take their lot of life or death, in defence of fireside and family. But the heretofore peaceful locality was visited by a band of strange men, and there was one traitor in the house.

In the strange and sudden terror of horrid prognostic, his wife had started several times from her sleep on the night of his death, and thought she never heard the wind moan so sadly as it did then. Her husband slept soundly, while she got up and looked out of the window. The moon was up, and her white beams were silvering the lake at some distance-resting on the leafy masses of the dark trees that swayed with a rustling noise nearer to her, and trembling on the waving grass and small movements of sleeping nature, like the young smile upon the lip and cheek of infancy, when the eye of its dreaming innocence is thronged by the angel figures that seldom visit our visions in after life. There was abundance of beauty in that calm night-scene, to have soothed her anxiety, but she thought the owl flitted across the window too often, with his sad cry and dull wing.

A slight creaking noise fell on her watchful ear; she turned, and saw that the door of the sleeping-room was open, while, with terrible fidelity, the

moonbeam showed the outline of thronging heads in the doorway, and glittered on the instruments of death. It was enough-his hour was come; and her cry of piercing anguish roused him from his mortal slumber, to be soon exchanged for the long sleep of a bloody grave. He ran with mad speed into the closet off his bedroom, whither the men of darkness followed him, exchanging their stealthy pace for the firm, quick step of determined murder. The slight fastenings yielded to them at once. The false servant had taken care to draw the charges from his fire-arms; and the first assassin that bounded into the narrow closet was the same traitor—the man whom his master had hired and trusted in all the confidence of ignorance. Three times did he pass the sword through the body of his prostrate victim, and at every bloody thrust he shouted, "Think of Edmund Reilly!" The weapon was left behind by its owner, and no further wrong upon the house or its inhabitants, was committed by the gang. Any of the three deep wounds would have been a death in itself, so that there was no quivering delay in the separation of soul and body; the former was immediately before the throne of the Eternal, while the hot blood from the latter was crying out for vengeance. And it was not far behind; they were met by those who, though too late to save their friend, were yet early enough to avenge him. Some of the murderers were killed on the spot; some were reserved for the slower punishment of the law; but there was no certainty about the fate of the leader in the deed of blood.

Had the widow been a woman of weak mind, or, strong as she was, if she had had no tie to life, she would have died in the first flush of delirious fever, or might have slowly parted with reason, a victim to gloomy sorrow. But his child lived, to claim her care. She left the house shortly after, in the custody of two old servants, and went away, no one knew whither; but it was believed she would return, as she yet retained the property in her hands. It was strange enough that year after year, as the anniversary of her husband's murder came round, she regularly visited the fated househer coming being very secret, and her

stay strictly private for about a week. At last, after the lapse of several years, she came with the intention of making a more protracted stay-a lonely lady, still clad in the outward signs of mourning, that accorded well with the pensiveness of her pale features, and the mild dignity of her figure and gesture. She looked older than she was, except when an occasional smile hid the traces of years and sorrow on her cheek, as the spring green on the younger boughs of the tall tree, conceal from the observer's eye the blighted branches, that speak eloquently of age and tempest. Her house soon became known as the abode of a feeling heart and generous hand; and the children of affliction bent their way thither, and seldom left her door in the weariness of disappointed hope. When the eye saw her, it gave witness to her, and when the ear heard her, it blessed her; for her words and act could minister earthly comfort to earthly woe, and also point out the joys and hopes of an eternal heaven.

The Spa had lost its fashion, and most of the votaries of the goddess had of course followed their idol wherever its priests pitched on new temples. Still, there remained some families, to whom she had been known in her year of happiness; and the dark page in her former history gave her a touching interest in the minds of a few, and raised no small curiosity in those of more-a curiosity which was increased by her secluded method of life. All that could be learned by application to her servants was, that her son lived in Germany, but was soon expected home; that she herself slept in the room, which she occupied when she was a wife; and that she spent some part of almost every day in the closet where her husband had been murdered. This latter was a point of interest equally to the servants' curiosity, as to that of the neighbours; because to the former it was a kind of Bluebeard's chamber, their mistress keeping the key of it herself, and never suffering any one to cross its mysterious threshold.

At last her son's time of foreign travel and study drew to an end, and it was understood he was to be shortly home. He did come; and so far as externals went, no one could have

raised too high an expectation of him, to meet any disappointment; but his cheek was pale from the study of books, especially those of gloomy mysticism, in the perusal of which he culpably revelled, to the neglect of more healthful pages. It was also thinned by a nervous inward-looking upon his own spirit; for he belonged to that order wherein is invested the morbid intensity of feeling, whether it be of good or evil. He was of that order of men, whose imaginations are ever at work with the keen knife of self-torment, tracing and exhibiting to their own heated perceptions the naked anatomy of every mental, every bodily nerve, with its thrill of ecstacy or jar of agony. He was of those into whose minds a single unguarded word often sinks, with a stain deep enough to poison one of memory's fountains for ever. He was of those with whom life never glides smoothly, still less stagnates; but where the soul's pulses ever beat with fevered haste, and flush with fevered heat. He was of that order upon which the wise philosopher looks with pity, because he has made the theory of genius a subject of his study, and knows well, both from reading and experience, of the sad havoc that idiotcy, mania, broken hearts, and early deaths have made among the ranks of its

sons.

But mother and son met with the fullest and fondest love; and a hundred plans of future happiness were formed by the latter in his first sanguine hour. He was to go abroad no more; he was to marry, too, and forget the dreamy speculation in which he had indulged too freely, in fulfilling the duties of son, husband, and landlord. Was his mother to be blamed if, while she smiled, she felt some inward sadness? For nearly thus, not so enthusiastically, had his father spokennearly thus had his father looked, though his features never wore SO glowing an expression as those of his son-such had been the father's promise; but an early grave of blood and murder had been the bitter fruit.

The servants rejoiced at their young master's return; indeed the old butler, who had served his grandfather, wept for joy when he saw the tall, handsome youth, and, with respectful love,

pressed his long, thin, white hand in his own. The sight of this grey man with his bald and furrowed head, had a terrible interest for the youth, who remembered too well the impression the story of his father's death had made on him, the last time he heard it some few years ago; and it was only two nights after his arrival that he sought the old butler's room, before he went to rest, and asked him to tell the tale again. The man knew, and could well describe, the secret history of the deadly hereditary enmity, that scorned any expiatory of fering but that of blood.

"He was walking in the shrubbery three days after driving out Edmund Reilly," continued the narrator,“ when he saw him leap from behind a tree, with a cocked pistol in his hand. Your father (the heavens be his bed!) was running on beside the old gentleman, when Edmund pulled the trigger. But he missed his aim; for the bullet went through his hat, without hurting a hair of his head. Your grandfather caught him, and got the better of him, for he was stout, and never saw a day's hardship, like Edmund; and your father ran for a couple of rangers, and they took him off. He was tried at the next assizes, and the old gentleman swore hard against him, for he never forgave anything; and he brought up your father, and made him swear too. They found him guilty without leaving the box, and the judge refused him a long day; so he sent for his son, and made the boy catch hold of the iron bedstead he was lying on, and swear by it that he'd have blood for blood. 6 Think you see nothing on the palm of your hand,' says he to the chap, but the rust of that bed, till you wash it clean in the heart's-blood of the man that first robbed and then hanged your father!' The old gentleman died before any harm could happen him, but the oath was kept on my innocent master. And perhaps, after all, the villain is alive still, for he never was hanged or shot, that I could hear; and it would be no natural death for him to go in his bed like a Christian."

The servant saw his tale was eagerly listened to, and garrulity ever winds itself round attention. He talked of his lady's seclusion every day, for a certain time, in the small dressing.

closet of the tears that had been sometimes seen on her cheek when she came out; and the old man's curiosity was interested in the hint he gave his young master to look into the room. Perhaps, too, his ancient family feeling was a little sore, that anything should be kept a secret from a long-tried servant like himself. The midnight hour, the flickering candle, the whispered tones of the grey talker, the thought that perhaps some young arm was even then in the course of murderous training, by lessons of hate to himself, for the injury committed by his ancestors, and the mystery of his mother's closet-all were inagnified by the youth's clouded mind, while he sat greedily listening, with his face buried in his hands; and there ap peared something more than enthusiasm in his large, lustrous eye, as he left the servant's room in silence.

A few days after, his mother was slightly ill he sat beside her bed, and as he passed his arm round her neck to kiss her, and say good night, his fingers came in contact with a key under her pillow. He grasped it, drew it quietly out, and then sat down for a short time near the bed's head, until he saw her sink into a deep sleep. Conscience must have spoken against the secret and ungenerous movement, the gentle breathing of his mother's slumber must have swelled the accuser's tones; but the cravings of a diseased mind were too strong for the voice of the inward monitor, and he cautiously rose, took the candle from the table, and approached the fatal door. His mother slept on, and stirred not; his hand shook, and the damp drops of perspiration stood on his forehead as he placed the key in the lock, turned it, and entered the room. His father's initials were still plainly legible upon a mouldering shirt: his father's blood cankered on the rusted sword which hung near the shirt; and the deep, dark-red stain from the same blood was on the ground under his footstep.

Shortly after his mother woke, and saw the reflection of a candle through the open door of her closet, and heard the strong, regular tramp of a foot; with the tones of a voice occasionally breaking in, sternly and fiercely, on the heavy noise. It was no dream; it was her son's voice. She got up and

ran to the door, and saw him in such plight, that it were better she had followed his early and guileless coffin to the grave, or filled the same narrow house herself with her husband, than have lived to behold him thus. The

fiery gleaming of insanity was in his eye, the rusted sword in his right hand, and its point thrust furiously forward at some imaginary foe, whom his wild voice taunted and challenged to the conflict. The shirt, with its deep, brown stains was in his left hand, waved occasionally, with an unearthly

howl, over his head, and then thrust forward, banner-like, in time with the stamping foot and the plunging sword. He was a maniac-he is a maniac still. The stern keeper is ever at hand, and near him sits untiringly his pale and faded mother, watching him, as he talks to airy sprites and fancied forms -but not to her—and gazing at the visions of his erring brain; but never casting on her a single glance of meaning-a single look of love. They were the second of the three last tenants.

WHEN it was announced, after the departure of the last family, that the great English lord, who was head proprietor of the house, had set it to a new owner, people were inclined to wonder how that could be. Of late, the peasant would avoid the vicinity after nightfall; and the better classes, while they listened with smiles to the stories of white ladies and bleeding men, allowed that if ghosts were found anywhere, Elmwood-house would be a very likely locality. The gradually increasing desertion of the town and its environs, added to the suspicious reputation that was settling down on the house; for people had now fewer living neighbours on whom to speculate, and the shadowy denizens of Elmwood were pressed into the service of gossip for want of more substantial food. The grass was beginning to encroach more and more on the pretty bye-roads, and the reason was a good one-namely, that there was no quick succession of carriages, pedestrians, and equestrians, to keep down the livery of decay-decay, man calls it! but the decay is in his own breast, and on his own forehead. ture's heart is ever strong; her brow is ever green while from her rankest weed may be extracted something to minister ease to one of bodily suffering's many shapes, and hush into quiet at least one throb of a fevered bo

som.

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The Sunday after the arrival of the new tenants, the eyes of many of the congregation were turned to the high pew in which the owners of the illfated house always sat, when at divine service, to see whom it contained.

VOL. XXXII.-NO, CLXXXVIII.

There was one gentleman in it. It was remarked that he walked to church, and that he arrived earlythat is, before service began; and people were disposed to augur favourably of the person who could dispense with the state of a carriage on Sunday, and walk into his aristocratic pew with no more appearance of pretension than was shown by one of themselves, when they sat down on their humble benches. Such was the burthen of the whisper offered by the poorer men and women to their neighbours, as they eyed the new-comer.

His dress agreed well with his demeanour, and was plain in fashion, of uniform material, and dark in colour. In person he was little above the middle height, and his frame was remarkably slight and spare. His age it would not be easy to tell; for there are faces and figures that baffle calculation on this point, and his face and figure were of these. His head was small, and well-formed, the forehead especially, which showed no tendency backward, but was bold, massy, and erect. Time or thought had been dealing with it too, for its upper parts were balder than they should have been; while from the boundary of the clear, white skin above, the rest of his head was covered by hair of a greyish tinge and silky consistence. If his eyebrows had ever been arched in youth, they had now lost their bend, and were thick, dark, straight, and immovable. The eyes beneath seemed to be habitually downcast; but whenever they were fixed on those of another, the person who encountered the piercing organs, felt that the next moment must have

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seen his own glance sink before their keen expression; if the stranger had not chosen to yield the victory, he could have gained at his option. Yet there was no forced rolling of the eye, no furrowing of the black brows; it is too often imbecility that loves this tortured twisting of the outward skin, as the puny child puts on an ugly mask to try and frighten its playmate. With him these were not needed, for such an eye as that man owned could not rest in a weak socket, nor borrow its quiet terror from a feeble heart. His cheek was smooth and thin; his nose finely curved, and it was easy to augur strength of resolution from the dry and compressed lip. The mind within seemed to have shed a spell of repose over the outward semblance; yet on his tutored face were the lines of passion and feeling, waiting only for the finger of a proper occasion to rouse their action-as the harp hangs in silence, until the master's hand wakes the music of its strings.

The church service proceeded through its alternation of psalm, prayer, and lesson. Apparently, there was no more attentive listener than he whom I have attempted to describe; and it was subsequently remembered well, that his voice could be heard clearly and distinctly praying for power to keep the commandment, after the minister's tongue had repeated "Thou shalt do no murder." In the present depressed time of the neighbourhood, the rather novel feature of a large silver offering to the poor could not escape observation: the rarity at once revealed the donor, though the money was given noiselessly, and without show.

The young clergyman ascended the pulpit to address the congregation. His white cheek, his tall and rather bent frame, with an appearance of general delicacy, forced on the observer a suspicion that perhaps the time was not very far distant when the young man himself would be called to prove the truth of the faith he preached, and the works he practised. His text was the involuntary exclamation of the bad but gifted prophet-" Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my latter end be like his." He showed that unless "the man whose eyes were opened” had a full perception of eternity, his words could carry no mean

ing-because fever and consumption rack and waste the good man as unsparingly as they do the bad; and there is not a sting less of nature's pain in the former's death-bed than in that of the latter. He then dwelt upon the self-deception of the human heart, which loves to gild its own sin, its avarice, its rottenness, by a goodly wish, a holy aspiration. And the lines of his face trembled with high energy, and his full eye brightened with increasing light, and his pale cheek threw out its red flush, while he spoke of the latter end of the righteous, of death's blunted sting, and the grave's barren victory; and if there were any among those assembled, who never looked beyond the narrow bounds of three-score-and-ten years, they could not plead in excuse that their minister had shown no heartfelt earnestness in pointing the way to an opening heaven and an eternal life. It was observed that the strange gentleman appeared to listen with attention-his arms crossed on his breast, and his eyes occasionally raised from their downcast meditation, and fixed on the preacher.

After the service was concluded, the young clergyman and the newcomer stood together in the churchyard. Massy and rusted iron railings surrounded the square resting-places of the wealthier part of mortality; upright stones, with their usual inscriptions of age and panegyric, with ornaments of carved and kneeling saints, pointed out the graves of others; misshapen, moss-grown blocks lay at the heads of many of the mounds, and some were decorated with festoons of short white ribbon streamers and paper chaplets. The rank grass and strong weeds, the few trees of weeping ash, a dozen or so of evergreens, with the surrounding wall, whose grey stones are nearly covered with ivy, completed the entire. That churchyard presented to me the other day the same features, while I stood over the grave of the man whose memory forms the theme of these pages, as it did to his eye when he walked there that Sunday a few years ago, full of life and strength. And how beautifully does the house of prayer harmonize with its burial-ground. separate them-never sever the temple from one of its most consecrating associations. It is not on the solemn

Never