withdrawn from the field of battle, to meet this unexpected onslaught in the rear, the movement brought disorder into the ranks, and, notwithstanding many prodigies of valour, the Muhammadan army was at length broken, dispersed, and nearly exterminated by adversaries no less brave than themselves, not less steady, much more numerous also, and who were fighting in their own country pro aris et focis. Abd al Rhaman perished on the field of combat, and the feeble remnant of his army that escaped from slaughter made its way back to Narbonne, which Charles Martel endeavoured ineffectually to carry by assault. He ravaged the neighbouring country, whose barons, all Christian as they were, made common cause with the Arabs, to preserve themselves from the ferocity of the Franks. This signal victory saved France, and possibly the whole Christian world. If the banner of Islamism, conqueror of the Greeks as well as of the Iberians, and already threatening Constantinople, had waved from the towers of Paris, it would have been difficult to have found at that moment in Central Europe a power sufficiently strong to oppose itself successfully to the double torrent of Orientals pouring along the two channels of the Rhine and the Danube to unite in the heart of Germany. Then the religion of Muhammad would have been the Catholic, the universal religion. "One might," says M. Louis Viardot, "establish upon such a supposition an interesting controversy; ask oneself, for example, if the substitution of one form of worship for another would necessarily have altered the destiny of the modern world, and if the genius of Europe would have been more constrained and limited in its development by a religion sprung from Arabia than by one sprung from Palestine. When we remember Jean Huss, Galileo and the Inquisition, we are permitted to doubt if this would have been the case, and to believe that Europe would no more have been found wanting in progress under the law of Muhammad than under that of Jesus." We may, however, without any sectarian bigotry, express our dissent with these views of a liberal and not unenlightened writer. Several of the leading features of Islamism, as the principle of fatality, the admission of only one bookthe Kuran-the debasement of the sex, the repudiation of the arts, and others, are more opposed to civilisation than even the Inquisition and many other practices and tenets of priestcraft and popery-institutions superimposed by the West upon the Christianity that emanated from the East. But these features of Islamism appear in modern times to be less inexorable than popery-for the Turk is admitting works of science and literature largely; he is beginning to appreciate and patronise the fine arts; he entertains some general ideas concerning prejudice and intolerance; and he has been taught even to esteem the sex-so it is difficult even in the present day to say what Islamism may not have become had it been modified by European instincts and development. THE MINER'S TALE. FOUNDED ON A TRADITION CURRENT AMONG THE MINERS OF CAERNARVONSHIRE. A WEARY man was Griffith Owen; sick at heart and sore of foot. Long seemed the mountain way, and heavy the load of glittering trinkets and rustic finery in the ponderous pack. Many a steep mile had Griffith, the sturdy pedlar, plodded since the sunrise; at many an inn had he in vain displayed his tempting wares; many a cottage had he fruitlessly visited. The times were bad, for war, like the Arab wind of death, had swept over England, and the angel of destruction had visited alike noble's tower and peasant's hut, nor had stayed his hand even at the "lintel dashed with blood." Hard times they were when the flames of civil war glowed over the land; brother fought against brother, and armies more terrible than those of the stranger, Like the wind's blast, never resting, homeless, Hard times for the peasant, for what the Cavalier trooper spared, the Ironside bore off; and the mountaineer, who to-day might be playing the humble but generous host to some Royalist officers in his poor home, was to-morrow, perhaps, on his way, as a branded malignant, to a bloody grave in the courtyard of the nearest fortress. What broad pieces had village lovers now to waste on pedlars' gewgaws, when half their hard-earned earnings went to swell the forced loan of some parliamentary commissioner, who had all the power of an Eastern despot without his attempering mercy? What heart had pale-cheeked maidens for gaudy love-knots and gay tirings, when they were cowering by their father's hearth, spinning by firelight in the barred-up cottage, listening to some panic-stricken messenger from the nearest town, or, mayhap, stealing out in the twilight to drive home the now almost wild sheep from the rock-strewn mountain side? The Royalist cause, at the time of the great civil war of which we now write, was at its lowest ebb. Monk, the fiery wielder of the dead giant's sword, had overawed with it those who already longed for the restoration. Those beautiful valleys of Caernarvonshire, of which I write, had rung long since with the crack of fire-arms; long since had those mountains, on which Owen gazed now as he had when an infant, gave back the echoes of death as if with the reverberations of a spirit's voice, and with them, sounds no less terrible, the execrations and the maddened cries of struggling men. The old towers built by great chiefs, whose names were still current in the country side, in the song and legend of the mountaineer and the dalesman, had fallen, too, under the iron hand of Cromwelllast relics, glass statues of an expired feudalism, shattered by the genius of democratic fanaticism-their fall, like the last throbs of a strong man dying, had shaken the land as with an earthquake. Castles, which the peasant who lived near them had been accustomed to consider as eternal as the mountains, those tombstones of former worlds which towered above them-they passed from the scene like the clouds with which their turrets had so long held dark communion with him. The old rock nests had been pulled down and the birds had flown, and the proud descendants of the Cambrian kings-once the glory of the valleys beneath-were wanderers now, ay, and even beggars in a foreign land. An unnatural full had followed the storm thunders, for in these distant and lonely valleys of Merionethshire, where our scene lies, the stray broad sheet of the day had not reached for weeks. But when some passing traveller brought word to the anxious listeners at the village inn, that Monk was ruling with a rod of iron, that plots were hatched but to be discovered, that the Royalists crept to their hiding-places like birds of night at the approach of day, at which news the Royalist shrugged his shoulders, bit his lips, swore an oath or two in his sleeve, and preserved a very prudent silence, while the Puritan smiled grimly, and uttered, with due twang and emphasis, some text adapted to the occasion. How could Owen, then, sell his gay treasures in times like these, when the sour fathers of village maidens thought silken ringlets hooks of the great tempter, and ribands that adorned them, snares of Apollyon himself? It was almost evening-a summer evening-when our friend the pedlar turned from the great road that leads from the eagle-towered city of Caernarvon into the heart of Merionethshire, and trudged away over a steep mountain-path in the direction of Drws y Coed, "the door of the wood," a pass formed by the great granite roots of Snowdon, that stretch forth like the feelers of some giant monster frozen to stone-a spot which, as its name and the legends appertaining thereto indicate, was once covered by dense forests, the haunt of the boar, the deer, and the wolf, where the Welsh kings hunted animals scarce less savage than themselves. In the western sky, "night's great pageant" was commencing; in the horizon, was streaming up a red light as of some burning town, the fainter reflection of which, fainter and calmer as of a dawn before its time, lit the peaks of the eastern mountains, suffusing them with a rosy light, as if the internal fire of a volcano was shining through its stony casket, rendered transparent by some spirit of a bygone religion that still haunted its summit. On strode manfully the pedlar, encumbered as he was with his heavy pack, clambering over jutting masses of rock, and keeping his eye fixed on the ground to trace out the ill-defined path which led from one hamlet to another; but one mile led but to another steeper than the last, and still no village in sight. In vain he gazed below on the lakes, as if to see if any cottage was mirrored in those clear depths which now glowed in the purple light, reflecting those transitory splendours so unearthly and so sublime. Wending at last to a small defile, hemmed in by rocks which seemed to forbid an exit, the weary man, with an expression of impatience, threw his pack on the ground, and his pedlar's staff beside it, and first leaning against a mass of lichened rock, he finally seated himself upon it, and gradually yielding unconditionally to the overpowering influence of fatigue that overcame him, he threw himself at full length upon the ground, resting his head upon the load that had so grievously galled his shoulder; and while he thus tarries, reader, let us sketch our friend Griffith more minutely. A broad-leafed hat shadowed a good-looking face, whose regular features bore an expression at once of shrewdness and generosity; neglect, eccentricity, or the wish of 66 disguise, not unlikely in those troublous time, had led him to nourish a beard of formidable length, which mingling with the hair of the upper lip, gave the wearer so wild and perhaps so savage an appearance, that a passer-by, forgetful of the conventual form of dress, might have imagined him a British chief resting after the toils of the chase. Strange," he muttered half aloud, as he lay with his eyes closed, "that a mountaineer should lose his way in a spot as familiar to him as the chambers of his father's house; but my thoughts have been lately wandering far from hence, and Alps and Apennines are blended with Snowdon and Plinlimmon in my recollections. God help me! would I were well housed, for the night draws on, and my bones are as yet too well cased to fear the mountain-hawk. A shame on these aching limbs! will toil never season them?" he said with a sigh, as he raised himself, and was about to shoulder his pack and resume his toilsome walk. A sharp, deep, rolling sound of thunder burst suddenly from the very rock against which he had but the moment before been leaning, while a thick vapour and a strong sulphurous smell filled the air. The pedlar looked back as if he had heard God speaking from the clouds, while the mountain-top overhead gave back its last faint ray, as if reflecting the glare of some red storm. The pedlar's eye wandered as the vapour passed away over the storm-tinted rocks from whence the sound had come, and saw that, from a deep narrow rent in the nearest, a thin curl of smoke was still wreathing into the noiseless air. What madness has seized the pedlar? Again with the speed of thought he flings down his pack, and rushing to the aperture gazes in with glaring eyes, as if he would pierce the very secrets of its stony heart. Hurrah! Owen Griffith is a made man. Adieu, pack and staff! adieu for ever! "God be thanked!" he cried, as he fell on his knees on the hard mountain side, and raised his hand in earnest adoration to the setting sun, that sank like a flaming world in the horizon. "God be thanked!" he cried, "and the knockers that are his ministers in the deep places of the earth, if this is, as I augur right, a rich vein of copper, then come King or Protector, Griffith Owen will again rear the roof-tree of his father's house." Then, rising from his knees, half mad with joy at good fortune so providential and unexpected, he gave a bound in the air, whirled his staff round his head, hit the rocks a blow of friendly recognition that would have felled a mammoth, and which sounded hollow, like an invocation for the hidden spirit of the mine; whistled "Tri ban gwyr Morgannwg," a national ditty, in the shrillest possible key; and then, clapping his pack hastily on his back, ran down the rarely-trodden and stony path with more of the speed of a hounded Indian than a decent Christian, much less a foot-sore pedlar. Going down a mountain is easier work than going up, and no hairsplitter will deny that jaded horse and weary traveller brush up their speed when home is in view. A sudden turn of the path brought him into a well-known path, which striking into brought him, in the darkening gloom of night, to his native village of Llanllyfni, from whence, some ten years since, as a wealthy young farmer, he had set forth, with his father's benediction and the family musket, to bear a pike in the cause of his prisoned king. With the cautious step of a spy he re-entered his native village, which lay nestling at the mountain's foot, its roofs looking gloomy in the darkness of a clouded and almost starless night. As he entered the street, an old hound, that he remembered well, slank by with a surly growl. No children gambolled there as of yore. All was changed and solemn. No light flashed from the cottage panes, and the greater part of the windows were cautiously barred, while in others the gleam of a scanty peat fire scarcely lit up the small and diminished circle round the hearth. The village, was as silent as if a plague had withered it—as silent as he remembered it when, as an urchin, he stared at the funeral of some old sachem of the district. A cross which had stood where the two roads that intersect the village met was gone, or, worse than total destruction, its shattered shaft told of the storm of fanaticism that had smitten it. Who had done that? Could it be old Stand-fast-in-the-Faith, the Puritan baker, who said a grace of half an hour over a stale herring? Ah! here is the inn! Griffith rubbed his eyes. Was the mountain, the thunder-clap, all a vision? Was he Griffith, or no? Where is the sign of the Rose and Crown gone? Where is the roaring fire that once lit up the windows of the hostelrie, even on a summer night? Where are the revel songs that once poured forth from the doorway, blent with the sound of squeaking fiddle and twanging harp, to scare the passing spirits of the night? Is the Rose and Crown, too, closed? No, there is a dull hum, as of gossip, from the inner room, as from the half-opened door looks forth Cicely Jones, the once buxom daughter of a merry, knavish landlord, whose ale was as good as his honesty was bad, and who, at least, with admirable consistency worthy of all praise, cheated rich and poor alike. Cicely. But, oh! how changed! with paler and sharper features, deadened eye, more sober garb and primmer head-tire, than of yore. "Cicely!" he would have exclaimed, forgetful for a moment of the lapse of years and his pedlar's disguise; but the words died away in a faint rattle in his throat. "Why standest thou there, good man?" said the transformed Cicely, with a shrill and sanctimonious voice. "Thou lookest like one of those ungodly hawkers of silly wares that haunt the country, and taint the land-one not fit to enter, for thy looks are profane, and thy calling is ungodly." "I want but food and a night's lodging," said the pedlar, gaily, in a feigned voice, "and to-morrow I go on my way, my pretty maid; in God's name let me in." "No idle using of God's name, sirrah," said Cicely, with an ill-suppressed smile of satisfaction at the compliment of the stranger, as with a somewhat milder manner she ushered the wandering man into the large kitchen of the quondam Rose and Crown. The old kitchen, indeed; but what a change! Where was Jenkins's harp that once stood in the comfortable nook, and over whose strings the hands of the old minstrel of the village used to wander nightly, as if over the threads of some magic loom. There were the flitches hanging still from the smoke-dried rafters over head, like great mellow fruit, ready to fall-fruitage of the kitchen Hesperides-which it was so delightful to look at, looming through a smoke cloud. Where was the withered sprig of mistletoe-happy tradition of Pagan times-that was wont to hang there from one merry Christmas till another? All gone! The room looked bare and |