Only the hares made a rustling noise as they ran about the long hiding grass. The house looked like the tomb of human nature amidst the vitality of earth.

"Did you see?" said one of the crew, turning pale, and hastening to go. "See what?" said the others. "What looked out of window ?" They all turned their faces towards the house, but saw nothing. Upon this they laughed at their companion, who persisted however with great earnestness, and with great reluctance at stopping, to say that he saw a strange hideous kind of face look out of window. "Let us go, Sir," said he, to the Captain;-" for I tell ye what: I know this place now and you, Signor Gualtier," continued he, turning to a young man, "you may now follow that adventure I have often you wish to be engaged in." The crew turned pale, and Gualtier among them. 66 Yes," ," added the man," we are fallen upon the enchanted part of the island of Cos, where the daughter of-Hush! Look there!" They turned their faces again, and beheld the head of a large serpent looking out of window. Its eyes were direct upon them; and stretching out of window, it lifted back its head with little sharp jerks like a fowl; and so stood keenly gazing.

The terrified sailors would have begun to depart quicklier than they did, had not fear itself made them move slowly. Their legs seemed melting from under them. Gualtier tried to rally his voice. "They say," said he, "it is a gentle creature. The hares that feed right in front of the house are a proof of it:-let us all stay." The others shook their heads, and spoke in whispers, still continuing to descend the mound as well as they could. "There is something unnatural in that very thing," said the Captain: "but we will wait for you in the vessel, if you stay. We will, by St. Ermo." The Captain had not supposed that Gualtier would stay an instant; but seeing him linger more then the rest, he added the oath in question, and in the mean time was hastening with the others to get away as fast as possible. The truth is, Gualtier was, in one respect, more frightened than any of them. His legs were more rooted to the spot. But the same force of imagination that helped to detain him, enabled him to muster up a courage beyond those who found their wills more powerful; and in the midst of his terror, he could not help thinking what a fine adventure this would be to tell in Salerno, even if he did but conceal himself a little, and stay a few minutes longer than the rest. The thought however had hardly come upon him, when it was succeeded by a fear still more lively, and he was preparing to follow the others with all the expedition he could contrive, when a fierce rustling took place in the trees behind him, and in an instant the serpent's head was at his feet Gualtier's brain as well as heart seemed to sicken, as he thought the monstrous object scented him like a bear; but despair coming in aid of a courage naturally fanciful and chivalrous, he bent his eyes more steadily, and found the huge jaws and fangs not only abstaining from hurting him, but crouching and fawning at his feet like a spaniel. At the same time, he called to mind the old legend respecting the creature; and corroborated as he now saw it, he ejaculated with good firmness, "In the name of God and his saints, what art thou?"

"Hast thou not heard of me?" answered the serpent in a voice, whose singular human slenderness made it seem the more horrible. “I guess who thou art," answered Gualtier:-" the fearful thing in the island of Cos."

"I am that loathly thing," replied the serpent; "once not so." And Gualtier thought that its voice trembled sorrowfully.

The monster told Gualtier that what was said of her was true: that she had been a serpent hundreds of years, feeling old age and renewing her youth at the end of each century; that it was a curse of Diana's which had changed her; and that she was never to resume a human form, till somebody was found, kind and bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. As she spoke this word, she raised her crest, and sparkled so with her fiery green eyes, dilating at the same time the corners of her jaws, that the young man thrilled through his very scalp. He stept back, with a look of the utmost horror and loathing., The creature gave a sharp groan inwardly, and after rolling her neck franticly on the ground, withdrew a little back likewise, and seemed to be looking another way. Gualtier heard two or three little sounds as of a person weeping piteously, yet trying to subdue it's voice; and looking with breathless curiosity, he saw the side of the loathly creature's face bathed in tears.

"Why speakest thou, lady," said he, "if lady thou art, of the curse of the false goddess Diana, who never was, or only a devil. I cannot kiss thee," and he shuddered with a horrible shudder, as he spoke, but I will bless thee in the name of the true God, and even mark thee with his cross."

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The serpent shook her head mournfully, still keeping it turned round. She then faced him again, hanging her head in a dreary and desponding manner, << Thou knowest not" said she, "what I know. Diana both was, and never was; and there are many other things on earth, which are and yet are not. Thou canst not comprehend it, even though thou art kind. But the heavens alter not, neither the sun nor the strength of nature; and if thou wert kinder, I should be as I once was, happy and human. Suffice it, that nothing can change me but what I said."

"Why wert thou changed, thou fearful and mysterious thing?" said Gualtier.

"Because I denied Diana, as thou dost," answered the serpent; "and it was pronounced an awful crime in me, though it is none in thee; and I was to be made a thing loathsome in men's eyes. Let me not catch thine eye, I beseech thee; but go thy way, and be safe; for I feel a cruel thought coming on me, which will shake my innermost soul, though it shall not harm thee. But I could make thee suffer for the pleasure of seeing thine anguish; even as some tyrants do': and is not that dreadful?" And the monster openly shed tears, and sobbed.

There was something in this mixture of avowed cruelty and weeping contradiction to it, which made Gualtier remain in spite of himself. But fear was still uppermost in his mind, when he looked upon the mouth that was to be kissed; and he held fast round a tree with one hand and his sword as fast in the other, watching the movements of

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her neck as he conversed. "How did thy father, the sage Hippocrates, " asked he, "suffer thee to come to this?" My father," replied she, sage and good as he was, was but a Greek mortal; and the great Virgin was a worshipped Goddess. I pray thee, go." She uttered the last word in a tone of loud anguish; but the very horror of it made Gualtier hesitate, and he said, "How can I know that it is not thy destiny to deceive the merciful into this horrible kiss, that then and then only thou mayst devour them?"

But the serpent rose higher at this, and looking around loftily, said in a mild and majestic tone of voice, "Oh ye green and happy woods, breathing like sleep! Oh safe and quiet population of these leafy places, dying brief deaths! Oh sea! Oh earth! Oh heavens, never uttering syllable to man! Is there no way to make better known the meaning of your gentle silence, of your long basking pleasures and brief pains? And must the want of what is beautiful and kind from others, ever remain different from what is beautiful and kind in itself? And must form obscure essence? And human confidence in good from within, never be bolder than suspicion of evil from without? Oh ye large-looking and grand benignities of creation, is it that we are atoms in a dream; or that your largeness and beniguity are in those only who see them, and that it is for us to hang over ye till we wake you into a voice with our kisses? I yearn to be made beautiful by one kind action, and beauty itself will not believe me!"

Gualtier, though not a foolish youth, understood little or nothing of this mystic apostrophe; but something or other made him bear in mind, and really incline to believe, that it was a transformed woman speaking to him; and he was making a violent internal effort to conquer his repugnance to the kiss, when some hares, starting from him as they passed, ran and cowered behind the folds of the monster: and she stooped her head, and licked them. "By Christ," exclaimed he, "whom the wormy grave gathered into it's arms, to save us from our corruptions, I will do this thing; so may he have mercy on my soul, whether I live or die: for the very hares take refuge in her shadow." And shuddering and shutting his eyes, he put his mouth out for her to meet; and he seemed to feel, in his blindness, that dreadful mouth approaching; and he made the sign of the cross; and he murmured internally the name of him who cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalen that afterwards anointed his feet; and in the midst of his courageous agony, he felt a small mouth, fast and warm upon his, and a hand about his neck, and another on his left hand; and opening his eyes, he dropped them upon two of the sweetest that ever looked into the eye of man. But the hares fled; for they had loved the serpent, and knew not the beautiful human being.

Great was the fame of Gualtier not only throughout all the Grecian islands, but on both continents; and most of all in Sicily, where every one of his countrymen thought he had had a hand in the enterprize, for being born on the same soil. The Captain and his crew never came again; for alas, they had gone off without waiting. as they promised. But Tancred, Prince of Salerno, came himself with a knightly train to see Gualtier; who lived with his lady in the same place, all

her past sufferings appearing as nothing to her before even a month of love; and even sorrowful habit having endeared it to her. Tancred, and his knights, and learned clerks, came in a noble ship, every oar having a painted scutcheon over the rowlock: and Gualtier and his lady feasted them nobly, and drank to them amidst music in cups of Hippocras, that knightly liquor afterwards so renowned, which she retained the secret of making from her sage father, whose name it bore. And when King Tancred, with a gentle gravity in the midst of his mirth, expressed a hope that the beautiful lady no longer worshipped Diana, Gualtier said, "No indeed, Sir ;" and she looked in Gualtier's face, as she sat next him, with the sweetest look in the world, as who should say, "No indeed :-I worship thee and thy kind heart*.”

SALE OF THE LATE MR. WEST'S PICTURES.

It is a villainous thing to those who have known a man for years, and been intimate with the quiet inside of his house, privileged from intrusion, to see a sale of his goods going on upon the premises. It is often not to be helped, and what he himself wishes and enjoins; but still it is a villainous necessity,—a hard cut to some of one's oldest and tenderest recollections. There is a sale of this kind now going on in the house we spoke of last week. We spoke of it then under an impulse not easy to be restrained, and not difficult to be allowed us; and we speak of it now under another. We were returning the day before yesterday from a house, where we had been entertained with lively accounts of foreign countries and the present features of the time, when we saw the door in Newman-street standing wide open, and disclosing to every passenger a part of the gallery at the end of the hall. All our boyhood came over us, with the recollection of those who had accompanied us into that house. We hesitated whether we should go in, and see an auction taking place of the old quiet and abstraction; but we do not easily suffer an unpleasant and vulgar association to overcome a greater one; and besides, how could we pass? Having passed the threshold, without the ceremony of the smiling old porter, we found a worthy person sitting at the door of the gallery, who on hearing our name, seemed to have old times come upon him as much as ourselves, and was very warm in his services. We entered the gallery, which we had entered hundreds of times in childhood, by the side of a mother, who used to speak of the great persons and transaction in the pictures on each side of her with a hushing reverence as if they were really present. But the pictures were not

*This story is founded on a tradition still preserved in the Island of Cos, and repeated in old romances and books of travels. See Dunlop's History of Fiction, vol. 2, where he gives an account of Tirante the White.

there neither Cupid with his doves, nor Agrippina with the ashes of Germanicus, nor the Angel slaying the army of Sennacherib, nor Death on the Pale Horse, nor Jesus healing the Sick, nor the Deluge, nor Moses on the Mount, nor King Richard pardoning his brother John, nor the Installation of the old Knights of the Garter, nor Greek and Italian stories, nor the landscapes of Windsor Forest, nor Sir Philip Sydney, mortally wounded, giving up the water to the dying Soldier. They used to cover the wall; but now there were only a few engravings. The busts and statues also were gone. But there was the graceful little piece of garden as usual, with it's grass plat and it's clumps of lilac. They could not move the grass plat, even to sell it. Turning to the left, there was the privileged study, which we used to enter between the Venus de Medicis and the ApoHo of the Vatican. They were gone, like their mythology. Beauty and intellect were no longer waiting on each side of the door. Turning again, we found the longer part of the gallery like the other; and in the vista through another room, the auction was going on, We saw a throng of faces of business with their hats on, and heard the hard-hearted knocks of the hammer, in a room which used to hold the mild and solitary Artist at his work, and which had never been entered but with quiet steps and a face of consideration. We did not stop a minute. In the room between this and the gallery, huddled up in a corner, were the busts and statues which had given us a hundred thoughts. Since the days when we first saw them, we have seen numbers like them, and many of more valuable materials; for though good of their kind, and of old standing, they are but common plaister. But the thoughts and the recollections belonged to no others; and it appeared sacrilege to see them in that state.

And each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat.

Into the parlour, which opens out of the hall and into the garden, we did not look. We scarcely know why; but we did not. In that parlour, we used to hear of our maternal ancestors, stout yet kind-hearted Englishmen, who set up their tents with Penn in the wilderness. And there we learnt to unite the love of freedom with that of the graces of life; for our host, though born a Quaker, and appointed a royal painter, and not so warm in his feelings as those about him, had all the natural amenity belonging to those graces, and never truly lost sight of that love of freedom. There we grew up acquainted with the divine humanities of Raphael. There we remember a large coloured print of the old lion-hunt of Rubens, in which the boldness of the action and the glow of the colouring overcome the horror of the struggle. And there, long before we knew any thing of Ariosto, we were as familiar as young playmates with the beautiful Angelica and Medoro, who helped to fill our life with love.

May a blessing be upon that house, and upon all who know how to value the genius of it.