before them! While Carl's eye was passing rapidly over the various objects before him, he perceived his companion suddenly start. Concern and agitation were again visible in her features. She seemed on the point of bursting a second time into tears, when Carl, once more, with affectionate earnestness, besought her to keep him no longer in torturing suspense, but acquaint him with the source of her sorrows.

"Lady, once more I implore you to tell me whence all this agony?" She eyed him steadfastly and mournfully, and replied, "A loss, dear Carl-a fearful—an irreparable loss."

"In the name of mercy, lady, what loss can merit such dreadful names?" inquired the student, shocked at the solemnity of her manner, and the ashy hue which her countenance had assumed. She trembled, and continued silent. Carl's eyes were more eloquent than his lips. Seeing them fixed on her with intense curiosity and excitement, she proceeded:

"It is a loss, Carl, the effects of which scarce befits mortal lips to tell. It were little to say, that unless it be recovered, a crowned head must be brought low!" She shuddered from head to foot. Carl's blood began to trickle coldly through his veins, and he stood gazing at his companion with terrified anxiety.

mur,

"Carl!" continued the lady, in a scarcely audible mur"I have been told to-day-how shall I breathe it !— by one from the grave, that YOU were destined to restore to me what I have lost-that you were Heaven's chosen instrument that you alone, of other men, had rightly studied the laws of spiritual being-could command the services of EVIL SPIRITS," she continued, fixing such an awful eye upon him, that it palsied his soul.

"Lady, pardon me for saying it is false, if it has been so slanderously reported to you of me; ay, false as the lips of Satan! I know nought of spirits-nought of hereafter, but through the blessed Bible," replied Carl, in

hurried accents, a cold perspiration suddenly bedewing him from head to foot. His feelings began to revolt-to recoil from his companion-whom he could not help suddenly likening to the beautiful serpent that beguiled Eve; but she twined her arms closely around him, and almost groaned in heart-moving accents, "Oh, Carl, Carl! that I might but tell you what I have heard of you, or rather what I KNOW of you!"

There had been something terrible in her demeanour, latterly. She seemed speaking as if of set purpose, and her eye was ever alive, probing Carl's soul to see the effect of what she uttered: so, at least, thought Carl. All his apprehensions about the hideous Inquisition revived, and with tenfold force. Was this subtle and beautiful being one of THEIR creatures?—a fiend, cunningly tutored to extract his soul's secret, and then betray him into the fiery grasp of torture and death?

It was long before he could speak to her. At length he exclaimed, "For mercy's sake, lady, tell me what frightful meaning lurks beneath what you say? What is your loss? What do you know, or have heard, of ME? Tell me, though I die!"

"Can you, then, bear a secret to the grave, unspoken?" she inquired, gazing at him with an expression of melancholy and mysterious awe.

"Did Thurialma appear again?"

The student gave a horrible start, turned ghastly pale, and almost dropped her from his arms.

"I know not what your words mean," he stammered, almost swooning. His companion's eye was fixed on him with well-nigh petrifying effect.

"Carl," said she, in a low tone, "I am about to tell you the source of my sorrows—that is, my loss. There is none near to overhear us?" she inquired faintly, without removing her eyes from Carl's.

"None! none!" murmured the student, a mist clouding his eyes; for, at the moment of his companion's

uttering the words last mentioned, he had distinctly seen a human face peering over the edge of the lofty terrace. He shook like an aspen-leaf, shivering under the midnight wind.

"What have you lost?" he inquired.

"The fellow to THIS," replied the lady, drawing off the glove from her left hand, and disclosing a bracelet, the very counterpart of that in Carl's possession. His brain reeled; he felt choked.

"What-what of him-that-hath its fellow?" He faltered, sinking on one knee, unable to sustain the burden of his companion.

"He is either a sorcerer, a prince, or a murderer!" replied the lady, in a hollow broken tone.

Carl slowly bared his shaking arm, and disclosed the bracelet gleaming on his wrist. He felt that in another moment he must sink senseless to the earth; but the lady, after glaring at the bracelet, with a half-suppressed shriek, and an expanding eye of glassy horror, suddenly sprung from him, and fell headlong over the terrace, at the very edge of which they had been standing.

"Ha-accursed, thrice accursed traitor!" yelled a voice close behind him, followed by a peal of hideous laughter. He turned staggeringly towards the quarter from which the sounds came, and beheld the old man who had given him the bracelet, and now stood close at his elbow, glaring at him with the eye of a demon, his hands stretched out, his fingers curved like the cruel claws of a tiger, and his feet planted in the earth as if with convulsive effort.

"Thrice accursed wretch!" repeated the old man, in a voice of thunder, "what have you done? Did not her Highness tell you who you were?"

"Tell me !-what?"

The old man suddenly clasped Carl by the wrist covered with the bracelet; his features dilated with fiendish fury; his eyes, full of horrible lustre, glanced from Carl to the precipice, and from the precipice to Carl.

"Tell me!-what?" again gasped the student, half dead with fright, striving in vain to recede from the edge of the terrace. The hand with which the old man clasped Carl's wrist, quivered with fierce emotion.

"Tell me".

did she say?"

once more murmured Carl-" What

"Bah!" roared his tormentor, at the same time letting go Carl's wrist, and, slipping over the edge of the terrace, he was out of sight in an instant-leaving Carl Koëcker BROAD AWAKE, and in darkness, for, with his horrified start, he had broken his lamp, and overthrown both chair and table. His fire had gone out to the last cinder, and a ray or two of misty twilight, struggling through the crevices of the window shutters, served to show him how long he had been DREAMING.

He groped his way to bed, shivering with cold, and execrating the opera which he had recently witnessed, whose ill-assorted recollections, with other passing fancies, had been moulded into so singular and distressing a

DREAM.

January 1832.

MY FIRST CIRCUIT:

LAW AND FACTS FROM THE NORTH.

IN A LETTER TO CHRISTOPHER NORTH, ESQ., FROM AN OLD CONTRIBUTOR.

*

The next moment I was enclosed in the hackney-coach, opposite the large portmanteau which contained my little all. 'Twas a truly miserable vehicle, and the sight of the skinny feeble horses made one's heart ache. "Where shall I drive to, sir?" inquired a husky voice out of a heap of old clothes from the coach-box. The Jarvey was a small spare fellow, with a thin face, and sharp watery eyes, and keen red nose-he looked as if he had been drinking gin all night. "Where to, sir?" he repeated. "Oh-Plowden Buildings, in the Temple, to take up a gentleman and his servant: and heark'eemake haste, for Heaven's sake!-'tis a quarter past nine already, and we must be at the Swan with Two Necks by ten o'clock exactly. D'ye think we can do it easily? "Oh, yes, sir-but ye see, we han't a hap'orth o' time to lose. Go it, ye cripples-go it!" he added, addressing his horses, at the same time tenderly recommending his suggestions to their attention by sundry blows upon their bony flanks-and off we rumbled from the door. Ah me, how nervous I became ! for we could not be going at a less rate than half a mile an hour; and imagine a stoppage in some of those infernal sinuosities leading from

* Only such portions of this paper are given as seem likely to amuse and interest general readers.