the pistols from the table, and presented them to him, desiring him to take his choice.

"In the name of heaven, Pemberton! are you mad ?"

"Not quite-I know a monster eight paces distant; I can tell in the face of the sun who is a hypocrite, a false friend, a seducer, and a murderer. I can point at him with my finger thus, and strike him, as I do now."

"Pemberton, these are the ravings of insanity! "Villain! Coward! and liar! they are not !Know you the name of Bertha? Ha! does it awaken your comprehension? - Here, then; I take my stand here; one, or both of us has looked his last on the material world fire!"

When I went up to him, he was weltering in his blood. A single convulsion passed over his face, a single groan escaped his lips, and he lay a corpse at my feet. But his pistol was discharged; I thanked Heaven I had not murdered him. The firing had alarmed the household; the servants came running towards the spot. They found their master dead, and looked to me.

66

You are right; it was I who killed him, but my going must not be hindered now. I will answer for what I have done elsewhere."

There was something, I suppose, in my air and manner, which seemed too resolute to be trifled with, and no one ventured to stop me. I returned

to Bertha.

She had grown worse, and the medical man gave it as his opinion, that she could not survive till midnight. He was right. Before sunset, her hand, which was clasped in mine, became suddenly clenched, her eyes grew glazed, and her lips white. She died without a murmur. At that moment, the officers of justice entered the room, and I was made their prisoner. Bertha's remains were carried to Switzerland, and were buried, by my particular direction, under the clump of trees where we had so often spent the summer evenings together.

I was tried for murder, and acquitted: I know not how or wherefore. For upwards of six months my reason was disordered; but I recovered. I I saw Geraldine once more-only once. You would not have known her again, she was so altered. She looked like a dead being, endowed with the power of speech and motion, but possessing no other attribute in common with the living. She was about to return to the south of France, with the intention of spending the rest of her life in a convent. She had hung all her hopes on me; she had loved me with all the passion of her nature; but she was an orphan, and I had taken away the life of her only brother. He might have had faults to all the world besides, but she had felt for him the attachment of a sister. We parted, never to meet again; but we parted

more in sorrow than

in anger." She gave me a ring, and a lock of hair, and her last words were, "We shall not soon forget each other."

Weeks, months, years, have rolled on, and I have continued to live only as other mortals do. The brilliant sun of my horizon is set; I am surrounded by the common glimmering twilight of the world. My dream of romance has passed away like a thing that never was. The dreary realities of existence stare me in the face at every turn. I am at times inclined to smile in bitterness of spirit, at the silly drivelling of life, the petty cares that agitate the multitude, the wild prospects of fruitless and profitless ambition that engross the few. At such moments, I could sit down with him of Abdera, and laugh at every thing. Yet not unfrequently, all this appears in a different light: the thought that my youth has passed over for ever, without having seen me realise one even one of my fondly cherished hopes, excites emotions of profound and abiding melancholy. Those years of romance which come so soon, and fly so fast, and can never again be recalled, have already added themselves to the invisible infinity of the past, and for me the poetry of life is at an end! There was a time when, even in my waking visions, my expanding soul has looked forward to the enjoyment of love so pure, and yet so passionate, of friendship so undying and refined, that

I have said, within myself, there cannot, even in heaven, be bliss superior to what this shall be. But that time is past, and though, amongst the theories of philosophy, or the creeds of the easily satisfied, I may seek for consolation, I know that the search is vain!" Que sert helas! d'arroser le feuillage quand l'arbre est coupé par le pied ?”

THE INCIPIENT AUTHOR.

My pulse beats fire, my pericranium glows,
Like baker's oven, with poetic heat;
A thousand bright ideas, spurning prose,

Are in a twinkling hatch'd in Fancy's seat;
Zounds! they will fly out at my ears and nose,

If through my mouth they find not passage fleet;

I hear them buzzing deep within my noddle,

Like bees that in their hives confus'dly hum and huddle."

TENNANT,

Now," said Vivian, seating himself resolutely before his well-appointed desk, "I shall be no longer a dallier round the brink of fame. This pen is the sceptre of my immortality; that paper the Magna Charta of my legitimate sway over the mind of man. Let them say what they like of me, I know that I was born for glory. I know it by the throbbing of my heart, by the gallopping of my pulse, by my moonlight walks, by my being in love, by my fragments of unfinished sonnets,

K