Our hero was a youth of susceptibility-he quitted the - regiment, and challenged the colonel. The colonel was killed! 66 66 What a terrible blackguard is Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy!" said the colonel's relations. Very true!" said the world. The parents were in despair! They were not rich; but our hero was an only son, and they sponged hard upon the crabbed old uncle. "He is very clever," said they both, "and may do yet." So they borrowed some thousands from the uncle, and bought his beautiful nephew a seat in parliament. Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was ambitious, and desirous of retrieving his character. He fagged like a dragon-conned pamphlets and reviews -got Ricardo by heart-and made notes on the English Constitution. He rose to speak. "We have nothing to leave you," said the parents, who had long spent their fortune, and now lived on the credit of having once enjoyed it. "You are the handsomest man in London; you must marry an heiress." "I will," said Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy. Miss Helen Convolvulus was a charming young lady, with a hare-lip and six thousand a year. To Miss Helen Convolvulus then our hero paid his addresses. Heavens! what an uproar her relations made about the matter. Easy to see his intentions," said one: "a handsome fortune-hunter, who wants to make the best of his person!" -"handsome is that handsome does," says another; "he was turned out of the army, and murdered his colonel ;"-"never marry a beauty," said a third;—“he can admire none but himself;" "will have so many mistresses," said a fourth;-"make you perpetually jea "What a handsome fellow!" whispered one lous," said a fifth;-"spend your fortune,” member. 66 Ah, a coxcomb!" said another. "Never do for a speaker!" said a third, very audibly. And the gentlemen on the opposite benches sneered and heared!-Impudence is only indigenous in Milesia, and an orator is not made in a day. Discouraged by his reception, Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy grew a little embarrassed. "Told you so!" said one of his neighbours. "Fairly broke down!" said another. "Too fond of his hair to have anything in his head," said a third, who was considered a wit. said a sixth ;" and break your heart," said a seventh. Miss Helen Convolvulus was prudent and wary. She saw a great deal of justice in what was said; and was sufficiently contented with liberty and six thousand a year, not to be highly impatient for a husband; but our heroine had no aversion to a lover, especially to so handsome a lover as Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy. Accordingly she neither accepted nor discarded him; but kept him on hope, and suffered him to get into debt with his tailor and his coach-maker, on the strength of becoming Mr. Fitzroy Convolvulus. Time went on, “Hear, hear!” cried the gentlemen on the and excuses and delays were easily found; opposite benches. Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy sat down-he had not shone; but, in justice, he had not failed. Many a first-rate speaker had began worse; and many a country member had been declared a phoenix of promise upon half his merit. Not so thought the heroes of corn-laws. "Your Adonises never make orators!" said a crack speaker with a wry nose. 'Nor men of business either," added the chairman of a committee, with a face like a kangaroo's. "Poor devil!" said the civilest of the set. "He's a deuced deal too handsome fora speaker! By jove, he is going to speak again-this will never do; we must cough him down!" And Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy was accordingly coughed down. Our hero was now seven or eight and twenty, handsomer than ever, and the adoration of all the young ladies at Almack's. however, our hero was sanguine, and so were his parents. A breakfast at Chiswick and a putrid fever carried off the latter within one week of each other; but not till they had blessed Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, and rejoiced that they had left him so well provided for. Now, then, our hero depended solely upon the crabbed old uncle and Miss Helen Convolvulus;-the former, though a baronet and a satirist, was a banker and a man of business, he looked very distastefully at the Hyperian curls and white teeth of Mr. Ferdinand Fitz LOVE'S HOROSCOPE. marry a man so admired,-will you always be faithful?" "By Heaven!" cried the lover "Heigho!" sighed Miss Helen Convolvulus, and Lord Rufus Pumilion entering, the conversation was changed. But the day of the marriage was fixed; and Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy bought a new curricle. Α By Apollo, how handsome he looked in it! month before the wedding-day the uncle died. Miss Helen Convolvulus was quite tender in her condolences,-"Cheer up, my Ferdinand," said she, "for your sake I have discarded Lord Rufus Pumilion!" Adorable condescension," cried our hero; "but Lord Rufus Pumilion is only four feet two, and has hair like a peony." "All men are not so handsome as Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy?" was the reply. Away goes our hero, to be present at the opening of his uncle's will. I did "I leave," said the testator (who, I have before said, was a bit of a satirist), "my share of the bank, and the whole of my fortune, legacies excepted, to"-(here Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy wiped his beautiful eyes with a cambric handkerchief, exquisitely brode) "my natural son, John Spriggs, an industrious, painstaking youth, who will do credit to the bank. once intend to have made my nephew Ferdinand my heir; but so curling a head can have no talent for accounts. I want my successor to be a man of business, not beauty; and Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy is a great deal too handsome for a banker; his good looks will no doubt win him any heiress in town. Meanwhile, I leave him, to buy a dressing-case, a thousand pounds.' "A thousand devils!" said Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, banging out of the room. He flew to his mistress. She was not at home. "Lies," says the Italian proverb, "have short legs;" but truths, if they are unpleasant, have terribly long ones! The next day Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy received a most obliging note of dismissal. "I wish you every happiness," said Miss Helen Convolvulus, in conclusion-"but my friends are right; you are much too handsome for a husband!" And the week after, Miss Helen Convolvulus became Lady Rufus Pumilion. "Alas! sir," said the bailiff, as, a day or two after the dissolution of parliament, he was jogging along with Mr. Ferdinand Fitzroy, in a hackney-coach bound to the King's Bench,Alas! sir, what a pity it is to take so handsome a gentleman to prison!" LOVE'S HOROSCOPE. 255 [Richard Crashaw, died at Rome, 1650. Author of Steps to the Temple; Delights of the Muses; Sacred Poems and Translations.] Love, brave Virtue's youngest brother, Ah, my heart, is that the way? Are these the beams that rule thy day? If those sharp rays putting on But if her milder influence move, And gild the hopes of humble Love; O! if Love shall live, O! where? Or, if Love shall die, O! where? THE MOUNTAIN TORRENT. BY JOHN CHALMERS, M. D. been thrust upon us by our rapacious neighbours, and you may have read about the struggle of 1809, when the Tyrolese won the admiration of Europe by a contest in defence of their liberty as brave as any that history has to record." "The river too," he added, after a short pause, and looking earnestly down upon the gurgling stream, " is quiet enough just now, but see it swollen with thunder showers or melting snow. It makes plenty of noise then, and works sad havoc to property and cattle, aye, and many a human life has been lost too when the Lena is flooded." Observing a sad expression steal over the old man's face as if from some painful recollection, I asked him if he had ever seen any one perish in the flood?" Aye, that I have, sir," he said, with a sorrowful shake of his head, "and at this very spot, too. But it is an old tale, and may not interest you." One sunny afternoon in the autumn of 1868, while passing a pleasant holiday in Southern Tyrol, I found myself upon the bridge which spans the Lena a short way below the little hill town of Roveredo. In the morning I had left Trent, which combines so remarkably the arcades, colour, and other characteristics of an Italian town, with Alpine situation and surroundings; and although it is but a dozen or so miles from Roveredo, a love for the rarer charms which by-ways afford led me, after clearing the pass of Calliano, to leave the course of the river Adige, and strike into the hills on a route which consumed the best part of the day. The weather had been sultry, and the rocky pathway leading down to the stream so steep and troublesome to traverse, "On the contrary," I replied, "I shall be that a halt upon the bridge afforded an agree-only too glad to sit down and listen to your able relief to weary limbs. Here, also, burst story. See, we may rest ourselves on this log. upon the view the full grandeur of the little Pray be seated." valley. On each side of the rapid Lena, which tumbled darkly along its broken channel to join the Adige, rose rocky banks, and pinecovered heights, stretching away upwards to be lost in the distant chain of snow-capped mountains, against whose white summits rose the sombre towers of the castle of Roveredo, which, standing like a sentinel upon the bank of the river above the bridge, filled up the middle distance with its majestic proportions. Leaning upon the parapet of the bridge, it was impossible not to feel that tranquillity of soul which nature never refuses to those who love her. The beauty of the spot, the air balmy with the odour of the autumn flowers, and musical with the song of birds, so numer-prepared to spend a merry day. One man ous in Southern Tyrol, the buzzing of insects, and the murmur of water below, so soothed me into forgetfulness, that it was not until he stood by my side that I became aware of the approach of a gray-haired old peasant. After bidding him good day, a salutation he courteously returned, I reverted to the subject of my meditations, and asked him how long he had lived in this peaceful and happy valley. "I have lived in this valley, sir," he replied, "ever since the French were obliged to abandon Roveredo, and that was seventy years ago. It is a pleasant place to live in, but not always so very peaceful or so very happy. More than once in my time has the din of war We sat down. The old man lifted his felt hat back from his brow, as if to clear his brain, rested both his hands upon his staff, and began: "When the news reached us about the end of October, 1813, that the ruthless bloodhounds of France, with the fiend Napoleon at their head, had been routed at Leipzic, and driven back in confusion towards the Rhine, the count called a gathering of his people to celebrate a victory which released them, for the time at least, from the fear of another French invasion. The tenantry attending readily to the call, assembled early in the day within the castle of Roveredo; all in good spirits and alone was absent. Bertollo sat in his cabin a gloomy man. Although a native of Piedmont, he had joined the French forces and fought with them at the taking of our little town. During the occupation of Roveredo he somehow won the heart of a peasant's daughter here-one of the comeliest maidens in the place: married her, and occupied a cottage, which you may see standing a short distance up the stream on the bank opposite the castle. "A passionate disposition, readiness to quarrel, together with a keen sense of the illfeeling his exploits both in love and in war had engendered, kept him apart from his neighbours; it suited his disposition better to roam about spearing fish and trapping wild beasts |