ness to listen, he laid his finger on Jenan's lips, to prevent his speech. "It's only the noise of the windholes, sir," he said at last-" I've stood in wild evenings and heard such sounds; they seemed like screams of raving madness, and presently, as the wind sunk, like sweet voices, but melancholy-dirges or waking' of corpses-one might fancy anything." "True!-anything; fighting or praying for life and mercy-cursing and blasphemy of murderers-anything!" Why did you start, sir? What made your hand tremble so violently as you laid your finger on my lips, just now?--what did you fancy you heard?" "Tell me, first, what did you fancy you heard?-But no, it was a wild fancy of my old brain, Jenan, that was all.-What does that devil on the wreck so long?-Ralph, you villain! Ralph! come back, I say!" "Alas! dear master, your voice can't reach him-he is but looking about for what he can lay hands on." "Lay hands on?-lay violent hands? No, no-t -there was no living thing there!-it was but my fancy. Yet you might have a wild fancy, a shocking fancy, as well as I-Hark! oh God! again!" and he grasped his companion's arm with a hand that shook so as to shake the old man's whole person, he remaining dumb as death, in intensity of listening, the while. "Now, did you hear nothing?" he burst forth. “I did hear a sound, as of a voice." "Ay, and it must be a long, a strong, a dreadful sound, to be heard above all the sea, and all the sounds of these caves and winds! A voice-you mutter-a voice!-go on-whose voice did you fancy it was? But I am mad-no matter what I fancied—what did you? But we might both have a mad conceit. Did you fancy anything particular." "I seemed to hear two voices." "So did I!-Come back, you wretch-you wrecker-murderer!-or may that dark sea and hollow hell at once swallow you quick !-Come back, and put an end to this dream, if it be a dream!" Pray, sir, do not exhaust yourself thusthe sea's too loud." "Then, end it you-you, yourself-now, now ! Did you not think it his voice, my poor boy's own? I know you did! -Answer me, and speak me dead at once! You know it-who could forget it? Speak-I'm ready!" 66 But ere the answer came, the sound of the wrecker himself, regaining land, rivetted his whole mind, while so deep a darkness, from invisible clouds of thunder (which already growled in the distance), joined to the fog, came over the night, that he was made conscious of the wrecker's presence only by his standing up, dim, before him, a black and figured shadow, for the embers shot light but a few feet into the mass of fog. "Was aught alive on board?-Speak, for the love of God!"-The sullen and malignant man baulked his frantic eagerness by a long pause, then muttered, carelessly-" There is nothing alive on board." "Was anything alive on board?' was my question, dog!" he said, in fury, between his set teeth. "Well, then, there was one dog on the wreck ;" replied the ruffian, laughing. A mountain's weight seemed heaved from off the breast of the fancy-fraught father. The suddenness of the relief was of itself a shock. "Only a dog— a poor dog," he rejoined, calmly, his suddenly softened nature melting toward even this humbler object. "And you left it to die? It would have been merciful to bring him ashore. The tide is running outwill he be likely to get to land ?" "And so bar our claim to the ship? Blood! something has strangely wrought on you to-night! Why, there's a rich cargo, that will lie dry by morning-I had it from the captain and owner, himself, that it's a rich one." "The rack again! -why, you said there was only a dog!" exclaimed Mr. Vaughan, in agony. "Ay, a dog of my breed!-did you not say I was a dog, just now? Did ye hear him howl when I-but never fear, he'll never witness against us, never howl more, unless in the night of the judgment!" "Wretch! what name? what country? what-" The wrecker had retired into the darkness, but soon reappearing in the narrow circumference of the dying light of the embers, proffered his hand to the impatient questioner-" Be pleased, sir," he said, "to accept the hand of poor Ralph, in token of his forgiveness for your causing the loss of his other!" "What means the mysterious wretch?" Mr. Vaughan exclaimed. "Answer my question, or return to the poor stranger on the wreck, if you be a man!-Horror of death! fellow," he added, shuddering-" what a cold hand thou hast!" A laugh of ferocious and triumphing insult sounded through the dark, while, to his astonishment, Mr. Vaughan perceived his figure moving away, he still holding what he had believed to be his hand. "Wish me joy, sir!" the villain shouted, while he touched Mr. Vaughan with a hand of living warmth!" wish me joy of possessing two hands, once more! Now I'm satisfied-now we are friends! There is a ring on that hand; shew it to the fire there, and see if you know it. The poor gentleman, when I got the better of him, entreated me to give that to the young lady, your ward, and his dying love and farewell to you. But when he was dead, it came into my mind to bring you hand and all!"-The unhappy father remained like a statue, speechless, holding a dead hand-the hand of his long-lost son. The young adventurer was returning, in high hope and fortune, but the ship, bound to a Welsh port, happening to be delayed off the Glamorgan coast, he determined to land, prior to his final return, perhaps to satisfy himself respecting the feelings of his young mistress, after so long an absence-perhaps, also, wishing to surprise his father and her with the sudden announcement, when he should visit home, to depart no more. On occasion of this tragedy, the wretched wrecker lord resigned his manor and castle to the family of Butler, and nothing is recorded of his after fate. The ruffian suffered for another crime, soon after. The lady is said to have preserved the hand and ring, for the remainder of her wasted life, in a sort of little grave, in an earthen vase, planted with sweet flowers, as the lady in Boccacio's novel preserved all she could retain of her lover in a pot of basil. Such was the fearful catastrophe which the Glamorganshire annals record as "God's Revenge against Wreckers." YOUNG HEARTS AND OLD HEARTS. YOUNG hearts and old hearts Young hearts are POETRY! R Young hearts are freshness, HOTSPUR. ENOUGH-GOOD AS A FEAST. BY GEORGE RAYMOND. "the bitter change Of fierce extremes."-MILTON. THAT the abuse of good is evil, is a self-evident proposition. Eighteen centuries have fully justified the poet in his words "Insani sapiens nomen ferat, æquus iniqui, Ultra quam satis est virtutem si petat ipsam." The sweetest things will cloy soonest, and when the sickness overtakes us, it is, ten to one, more nauseous than the bitter which the palate may at first have rejected. The pangs of satiety are as troublesome as those of inanition, nor can anything be conceived so excessively disagreeable as a land overflowing with milk and honey! The besetting propensity in men's minds for rushing into extremes, appears to have been a very old complaint. The Roman satirist lamented it as a perfectly hopeless case, and we have a homely adage in our present day, which bears out the "in vitium ducit culpæ fuga," -viz., "That he who commences popinjay will end with the sloven." No one can listen unmoved, to the piteous disclosure of the unhappy citizen in the "Connoisseur," whose good woman had so violent a passion for a clean home, that her floors had never been dry since the first hour she occupied the house. But in married life we must not expect to find consistent examples of anything—a state, which they say, is one course of contradiction: for-to begin-we have heard that the only intolerable state of matrimony, is that of moderation; that happiness is positively constituted in extremes, namely, of either love or hate! In courtship, too-that threshold to the temple-the anomaly has been thus defended :—“ I hate you, sir," observed a certain irritated beauty, on the importunity of her admirer. "I love you, madam," was his reply; "and as extremes meet, the earlier we are married, the better." But no sooner does a cloud pass over the ethereal mildness of the matrimonial sky, than the whole affair is in this way explained,— "Emma is only too good." Now, as this too good, is the very worst of it, it would be unnecessary to inquire further, as our case is proved; but if we were, it might appear that the lady, for instance, had deemed it within her privilege to break the seal of a letter addressed to her husband, and he considering this, in more senses than one, an infraction, makes his complaint accordingly; upon which the lady, in a positive fury, quotes the great volume of her patient affection, whilst mamma, in apostrophic sentence, dismisses the appeal, by-“Emma, sweet girl, you are only too good!" And too good, she really is: her sense of holiness, like the atmosphere three miles high, is so rare, that it is no longer fit for spiritual respiration. She learns, for example, that the nurse to her only child was not born in wedlock, on which she turns off the woman, at a moment's notice, and the infant dies; and thus setting up her own purity as a specific for the cure of all possible uneasiness, becomes more insupportable than the quack who, having a remedy only for the toothache, maintained that all other diseases under the sun were but of little consequence. How persuasive, how irresistible is courtesy! It is that incomparable anti-attrition which causes the wheels of the great social machine to run smoothly on. Nothing grates upon the ear, and the whole operation is soft as silk. But if there be one offence more impudent than another, it is superabundant civility. Rudeness is nothing to it,-nay, a positive affront is preferable, for you may resent that by a blow,-and there are few things more delightful than squaring accounts; but this, like a mob, follows you as you fly, and has the cowardice to strike you when you are down. Civility, in fact, in this state of putrefactive fermentation, makes the mind positively sick, and has the same effect on the sensibilities of a plain, honest man, as when he views his face in the meretricious surface of a "Dedication." Frankness is that pure, bracing climate, which preserves in manly vigour the health of the social world; but better were it to die of the "mal'aria" duplicity, than be braced to death by the friend who "always speaks his mind!" Verily, it is "always;" for this species of expectoration is never at rest. Unprovoked, unasked, it pursues its victim, like the nocturnal " Mohock," and with a cannibalism, to which the Indian is tame, tears you with the fangs of his honesty. Under the plea of surgery, he lays bare the wounds over which nature was beginning to spread the filmy promise of a cure, and leaves you to contemplate at leisure the wonderful physiological grammar of this new laceration. But to this vice of rushing into extremes, not unfrequently very innocent parties are victimized. The Hon. Harry Fitzosborne was one of this class. An amiable conspiracy of the town had "buckled fortune on his back, to bear her burden whether he would or no," and which, in fact, had nearly bent him double. His case was that of overabundant popularity! The idolatrous town, like the people of Thibet, had acknowledged, by some mystic sign, the Lama ordained for their adoration, and Harry Fitzosborne, like that most unhappy deity, was now passing his apotheotic days in perpetual enshrinement. Familiar as a household word was "Harry Fitzosborne" in the visiting circles of courtly London-the current coin of interlocutory traffic in the public places the sponsor to every eccentricity in fashion, and the chief actor in every stirring anecdote that required a star for its leading character. Fain would he have said, "open to all parties but influenced by none," but open was he to all and influenced by all, so that he passed about three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year in nearly the same quietude as the town of Brentford, in the good old times, at the last hour of an election. The moment he appeared, the revel was at the best-the night at high change. The buzz of his name had long preceded the sound of his footsteps, and the full sunlight of smiles which welcomed him outshone as well as outnumbered the waxen army of tapers. At once was he surrounded as a pedler, who suddenly makes his appearance in a populous village, and all were anxious to exchange some gewgaw "spirituel" with Harry Fitzosborne. The manacles of servitude were everlastingly about him-true, they were costlier than gold, and softer than the softest silk, but "freedom, the Spartan's inheritance, could never again be the portion of Fitzosborne. Often did he sympathize with that bel esprit, a certain French Marquis, who, fatigued with the blandishments of court loveliness, sighed for the favours of his house maid. Poor Fitzosborne could never stroll carelessly home from the opera-twenty carriages were at his disposal. Poor Fitzosborne could never scribble a billet at Brookes's-he was surrounded, like a honeypot, by swarms., Poor Fitzosborne could take no refuge in sickness, for his gate resounded again with the clamour of a "jour de fête." How many a roisterer, signalized with the morning's discolouration of the night's riot, has advertized his black eye in the defence of Harry Fiztosborne! How often has the beaten gamester laughed away the beggary of his pockets by protesting it was all owing to the "damned luck of Harry Fitzosborne." How frequently has Harry Fitzosborne himself, on witnessing the swaggering recognition of two tailors in the Mall, overheard the small whisper of one of them to a stander by" That was Harry Fitzosborne." How repeatedly has some beardless "fanfaron" boasted of last evening's pottle-deep debauch with Harry Fitzosborne, when, like the apprentice in the " Spectator," he was proved to have drank tea with his aunt quietly at Aldgate on the night in question. Such was the furnace-the white heat of popular applause, in which he constantly walked ; and while he panted for the reviving sprinkling of a few cool looks, or the "fraicheur" of a deliberate slight, he might have remembered that there was still a certain "vent de bise" called malice, which never lulled, and to whose howling the very elevation of his position the more exposed him. Some relief might it have been, in this ecstatic fever, to have recalled to mind the spleen of that Athenian, who, on being asked why he voted for the banishment of Aristides, replied-" I know no harm of him, but I was tired of hearing everybody speak in his praise!" But such, however, was the seeming horoscope of Fitzosborne; to live on as one picked and chosen from the world, and day by day acquiring, like Cato, a fame which he did not covet. What would he not have given to have been black-balled at a club, even for the poor boon of a doubtful vote! How often has the vulture envy gnawed him at the heart, as his eyes may have followed some one blessed by the black sentence of the ballot! "That man at least can creep into the shade," thought he. How frequently has he been torn with jealousy on observing the note of conversation suddenly drop, on some unlikeable person appearing in the offing of the whisper. "That man at least can claim some fraction of the day his own!" sighed he. Never could Fitzosborne extricate himself from the provocation to a feast, though the giver were the "monstrous bore" of the season --he always was called on to fix the day! Never could Fitzosborne plan an escape with only "Pyrrha," at Richmond,-he was perpetually vorticized with the planetary sex who whirl and waltz everlastingly round the earth! thus passed his days--each hour distilling the essential oil of life. The following is the elucidation of the very last entry on his journal. Mr. D——, a gentleman of irreproachable habits and unblemished reputation, was at this time greatly extolled by the fashionable world as an actor. Of the art he professed, he knew about as much as a native of Otaheite; but a general subscription of fashionable favour had determined it otherwise, to which Fitzosborne was, as usual, a liberal contributor. A play of Shakspeare was announced for representation, and amongst the number who made application for seats |